OurFuture.org Blogs: Digby

It's Baaaack: The Catfood Commission

Digby — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:42:13 -0800

Not that it ever went away. The catfood commission is the Zombie that has been clawing at the door since Obama was elected:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

The panel, which has been championed by Conrad and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H), would be tasked with stemming the unsustainable rise in debt.

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

You'll recall that during the transition period Obama was all for this commission (it was part of the Grand Bargain) and put it off until after health care reform was passed once people raised a fuss shortly after the inauguration:

McConnell said that when Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had previously spoken to Republicans, they struck a tone that indicated a willingness to work on Social Security. "That was the place that I hoped, based on what both he and the chief of staff had said earlier, we'd be able to move on a bipartisan basis. He kind of brushed over that issue" in his speech, said McConnell.

He said he has noticed a change in the administration's rhetoric over the last few weeks. "They seem to be kind of back-pedaling some," he said.

The back-pedaling McConnell sees comes after several weeks of intense lobbying from liberals concerned that Obama might be opening a door to weakening Social Security. And if the GOP isn't happy, it means the lobbying campaign has had an impact.

But they never took it off the table. In fact, it has come up over and over again in the past year. This new gambit is very, very bad, however:

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

The panel, which has been championed by Conrad and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H), would be tasked with stemming the unsustainable rise in debt.

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

The panel would also have the power to craft legislation that would change the tax code and set limits on government spending.

The legislation would then be subject to an up-or-down vote; it could not be amended.

Taking health care hostage is just one possibility, however, if they don't get assurances on this:

Raising the debt ceiling has become one of a handful of “must-pass” pieces of legislation Congress regularly considers without the usual partisan posturing, and often without much debate.

But before Tuesday’s hearing was over, Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn’t come along with it.

“There are rare moments in this institution when you can implement fundamental change,” Bayh said during Tuesday’s hearing. “This is one of them.”

Pelosi says no way, but there are some people inside and outside the House who may have something to say about that. Steny Hoyer indicated, as he did last winter, that he's very interested. And he's not the only one. This was from last February:

The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

"We feel like we've found a partner in the White House," said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman

I don't know where the White House stands on this today. Somebody should ask them right away. After all this crisis is imminent:

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

Most importantly, talk of cutting social security right now would be hugely popular, so all the incumbent Democrats should be intensely interested in getting that issue on the agenda in an election year. Lord knows, there aren't enough current problems to keep them busy.

Seriously, this is Shock Doctrine lunacy of the most obvious kind. Conrad and Bayh are out there saying it right up front. The government has poured trillions into the economy to save the banks and run useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the old people and the poor are going to have to pay the price. That's the way it works.

The Most Important Election In The History Of The World

Digby — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:08:23 -0800

So all day long I'm hearing the gasbags blather on about how this lame, off year election is a referendum on liberalism and Obama and things are looking grim, grim, grim.

The Democratic blue dogs have it all figured out:

"It looks as though the anger that has been boiling up the last couple of months is going to lead to a pretty high turnout from Republicans and from people who are concerned about increased spending," Altmire said Monday evening during an appearance on Fox Business Network.

"And I do think that if the results show Republicans have a pretty good night, that probably is going to lead some Democrats to think that, going into next year, we need to take a second look at the way that we've done a lot of bills we've addressed up to this point," the Pennsylvania congressman added.

Oh, Golly let's hope this radical eight month experiment in slightly less corporate conservative governance has run its course and we can get back to tax cutting, deregulating and bloodletting, which is what the government does best.

According to CNN, it's bad news for Democrats even before the votes have been counted:

Blitzer: ... our new CNN Opinion Research poll that shows the president enjoys a 54% approval rating with a 45% disapproval. Let's bring in our senior political analyst Gloria Borger who's looking at all these numbers.

This approval rating. Does it help him and does it help Democrats go forward? Because 53 percent's still a good number.

Borger: Let's put it this way Wolf. It doesn't hurtDemocrats. But this is a personal approval rating for President Obama and that doesn't necessarily translate into an approval rating for congressional Democrats.

And here's the real problem they've got right now. And that is that all the intensity and enthusiasm is on the Republican side. Our poll shows that Republicans are 5% more enthusiastic about their candidates than democrats. If you go back to the last election, the 2008 presidential, Democrats had a 19% lead on enthusiasm, so that's a big drop for them Wolf.

Blitzer: I should say 54% approval rating. Gloria stand by for a moment. Also in our brand new poll, there's this: when registered voters were asked who they would vote for in congress in the next election, they favored Democrats over Republicans 50% to 44% Republican.

There you have it.

They went on to discuss in depth the fact that the Republicans are on a huge roll because of this "enthusiasm" gap which translates into huge losses for the Democrats comparable to 1994. (And since Obama's job approval on the deficit is down to 40% the sky is falling.)

I'm sure you all recall the endless pearl clutching when Democrat John Warner won the Governor's seat in Virginia and Democrat Jim McGreevey won in New Jersey in 2001. What, you don't recall that those races were widely considered to be a referendum on Bush because he he'd stolen the election, lowered taxes on millionaires and the country had just suffered a devastating terrorist attack on his watch? That's because it didn't happen. The blatherers could barely rouse themselves to declare the Republicans in trouble when the Democrats actually took over the congress in 2006. The constantly said Bush was extremely popular well after his personal and job approval ratings were in the low 40s.

This is a perfect example from March of 2006:

As Media Matters for America has noted (here andhere), Matthews has repeatedly inflated Bush's likeability ratings. Appearing on the March 1 edition of NBC's Today, Matthews falsely suggested that until a new CBS News poll indicated otherwise, Bush had personal likeability numbers "going for him." In fact, Bush's favorability ratings have been low for some time; they were low when Matthewssaid in November 2005 that "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left."

From the March 15 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I'm amazed when 50 percent of the people don't like him -- just don't like this guy. Thirty-nine percent like him. Are you surprised? Does that fit with the world you walk in?

Yeah, it easily fit with the world that Americans who don't live in the beltway walk in. But in Matthews' world, Republicans are always popular and everything that happens is always a benefit to them.

And FYI, according to Chuck Todd, just because the Republicans have held NY 23 for a century it's really a Democratic district because it narrowly went for Obama. So if Hoffman wins, it's a serious loss for the Democrats and we can expect all Dems in swing districts to move right. he might be right about that last part, but not for the reason he says ...

Stay tuned to the cable gasbags who are all geared up with full election night coverage to rival the presidential race in 2008, complete with Big Board and duelling partisan shills. This is just that important.

Update: I should make clear that the voter intensity issue is real. The Democratic base is not enthusiastic and that could be a problem in 2010. But rest assured that Borger and the Borg are convinced this will only be helped by the Democrats moving to the right.

Just as they always say that Independents are independent because the Democrats are too liberal and the Republicans aren't conservative enough, they also oddly believe that the Democrats become demoralized when their party leans "too far" to the left while the Republicans become energized when they think their party is doing the same thing. The lesson is that moving left is always the problem. Even when nobody's moving left.

Man of the People

Digby — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:05:53 -0700

The rich people, anyway:

As autumn sets in, the progressive agenda on which Barack Obama rode to victory last November has stalled, even with Democrats controlling every branch of government. Key aspects of healthcare reform, like a public option, appear dead; climate change legislation, having narrowly passed the House in June, awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate; the Employee Free Choice Act and financial industry reforms have gone off the grid. Behind all these setbacks is a pattern: with little outright opposition, corporate interests have insinuated themselves into the legislative process to co-opt attempts at reform. As a result, the big-ticket items are rotting away, key provisions have been removed and bills are being weakened beyond recognition behind closed doors.

Certainly there are still those in Congress willing to stand up to pressure from lobbyists--like Cummings, who, after meeting with Gephardt and the Goldman Sachs executives, sent his letter anyway, launching an investigation by TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky. But the broader momentum is with the corporate interests, thanks to players like Gephardt who have escorted them to the bargaining table. In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold.

When Gephardt ran for president in 1988, his ads claimed he had "defeated the strongest lobbying effort in history," and even in his waning Congressional years, he hardly seemed a defender of lobbying. "I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok," he proclaimed in February 2003. By January, his run for the presidency was over; a year later, he gathered with friends in St. Louis for a retirement party. Many politicians and celebrities paid homage: via video, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter lavished praise on him, and sportscaster Bob Costas called him "the best president America never had." When a reporter asked Gephardt about his plans for the future, he said he was going to spend some time with his family and consider a couple of employment opportunities.

On January 1, 2005--before Gephardt's term had even expired--the Congressman's son-in-law signed papers to form a consultancy firm based in Delaware called Gephardt and Associates (now the Gephardt Group). But for most of 2005 it lay dormant as Gephardt joined corporate boards and advised a few big-name companies. Banned from lobbying Congress for a year, he soon discovered there were places outside Washington that needed influencing.

Like California: when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced legislation that would have opened the door to increased infrastructure privatization in January 2006, Democrats in the legislature balked. So Goldman Sachs, standing to benefit from these policies, sent Gephardt as an emissary to Sacramento, hoping to persuade the state to monetize infrastructure by levying tolls and then leasing roads to private investors for decades. "I've done some work with Goldman Sachs in their capacity as adviser to both the City of Chicago and now the State of Indiana," Gephardt told California lawmakers at a February 14, 2006, hearing, before extolling the virtues of infrastructure privatization if "negotiated properly."

(If you had any notion that Goldman Sachs is just another Wall Street firm, you haven't read this.)

Dick "son of a milkman" Gephardt was once the great working class hope for the Democratic Party, believe it or not.

I'm not sure how you can control this. It seems unlikely that you can pass laws that make it impossible for former officials to work as lobbyists forever and even then much of this stuff is done unofficially anyway. It seems to me that the only thing that might work would be publicly financed campaigns and even then the class solidarity and future rewards for whoring for business would still exist. It's a conundrum. Politicians in America all believe they deserve to be rich. Hell, everyone in America does.

One thing that should be done is that Democrats of all stripes should stop pretending that Democrats are anything more than slightly better than Republicans on these issues and only because they have to include unions and the working poor in their coalition in order to get elected. And even then it doesn't keep them from quietly selling themselves to highest bidder while they're still in office. Once they're out, they immediately pull on a metaphorical micro-mini and start trolling K Street for Johns.

h/t to BC.

Chasing the Nut Beat

Digby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:13:06 -0700

As you know, under criticism for allegedly failing to "expose" ACORN, The NY Times recently made (yet another) commitment to following the buzz generated on the right wing noise machine. Eric Boehlert (hopefully wearing a hazmat suit) dove into the toxic wingnut swill that passes for "buzz" and documents all the great "tips" the editor assigned to that beat would have gotten last week. Among other things, there was the great joy Real Americans apparently felt when the US failed in its Olympic bid. But this really takes the cake:

And then there was the stellar work produced by Andrew Breitbart, the self-styled leader of today's conservative "journalism." His site last week claimed to have uncovered a video of community organizers praying to Obama. Talk about "buzz"! Obedient right-wing bloggers such as Malkin, Atlas Shrugs, RedState, Stop the ACLU, HotAirPundit, Sundries Shack, along with cable TV talkers Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, immediately piled on, openly mocking a group of mostly African-Americans activists as they gathered in prayer. (If second-graders aren't off-limits from being called "Obama-worshiping drones" by members of the right-wing media, why would people amidst prayer not be ridiculed, right?) One right-wing site accused the organizers of "blasphemy," and lots more shrieked as loud as they could about how the devastating video confirmed that loony liberals were falling for the Cult of Obama. RedState: "Speechless." Hot Air Pundit: "Difficult to watch." Stop the ACLU: "It's a cult." HotAirPundit: "Shocking Video."

Slight problem: When some sane people outside of Breitbart's (hate) circle actually watched the video, they realized that the community organizers who gathered weren't saying "Obama." They were saying "Oh God," which is typical when people are in prayer. So, yeah, that was a hiccup. Meaning, the only reason Breitbart posted the video was in order to smear liberal activists in prayer because he thought they were saying "Obama." That was the whole point of the video. But Breitbart bungled the audio, which meant the smear collapsed, even some right-wing bloggers, such as ... well, pretty much all them, never bothered to correct their original posts in which they called the organizers out as creepy cult members.

But Times editors please take note -- huge buzz!

Breitbart has some, shall we say, issues. No news organization should ever apologize for not taking him seriously.

At this point, if I were in the UFO, alien abduction crowd I'd be pissed that I wasn't getting equal time. They should make a big stink about it so the NY Times is forced to assign an editor to cover the "flying saucer beat."

"I Can't Stand Those People!"

Digby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Peter Drier and Todd Gitlin have written an important story in Columbia Journalism Review that will set any media critic's teeth on edge. It's so infuriating to find out what utter creeps the people who decide what you need to know are.

No one packed heat, no one screamed at a member of Congress, no one called anybody a Nazi, no fistfights broke out. So—no story.

All that happened was that on Thursday, Oct. 1, a moving van pulled up in front of the largest house in a Main Line neighborhood just outside Philadelphia—the home of H. Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies—and eight demonstrators from Health Care for America Now (HCAN) got out. One was Stacie Ritter, a former CIGNA customer whose twin girls were afflicted with cancer at the age of four. Their treatment left permanent damage. CIGNA refused to pay for the human growth hormones that her doctor prescribed to help her daughters grow properly. When her husband was briefly unemployed, they were bankrupted.

No one was home at Hanway’s mansion. Ritter left a note to explain that the van symbolized a request: “Can I stay in your carriage house until we get back on our feet financially?”

The same day, in Indianapolis, HCAN organized a house call on Angela Braly, CEO of WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company. And in Wayzata, Minn., fifty protesters, holding umbrellas and candles, stood outside the lakeside mansion of UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley, in the rain, and screened a video that was unkind to the company. (HCAN has tried to buy time to broadcast the video on CNN, but the network refuses to air it.)

Total number of print and broadcast reporters who showed up at any of the three events: Zero.

For several months, HCAN—a national coalition of religious groups, community organizations, unions, senior citizen groups, health care professionals, and consumer advocates—has been organizing polite demonstrations, rallies, and public forums, trying to put faces on an industry that has spent multiple millions of dollars lobbying against reform, while angry protests at town meetings swelled August’s big national story. On Sept. 22, HCAN sponsored about 150 demonstrations at various insurance company headquarters around the country. The Los Angeles Times did not bother to report about the several hundred demonstrators at WellPoint’s California subsidiary office, located a few blocks from the newspaper’s office. Nor did The Philadelphia Inquirer note those who descended that day on CIGNA, nor The New York Times those outside UnitedHealth in midtown Manhattan.

They couldn't even buy coverage?

Meanwhile:

“At a certain point,” Indianapolis Star senior editor Jenny Green told us, the demonstrators are “not adding to the debate. They’re just one side saying exactly what you’d expect them to say.”

Her colleague, Greg Weaver, the Star’s deputy public service editor for business, maintained that the raucous town meetings of August, dominated by conservative activists shouting down Democratic Congressmembers, were newsworthy because they “are more of a public forum where you have many sides of the debate, whereas at the [HCAN] protest [at WellPoint CEO Bray’s house] you have only one side of the debate.”

“I did not think the protest at [Cigna CEO] Hanway’s house was news,” Philadelphia Inquirer business reporter Jane Von Bergen told us. “It was a staged event. It wasn’t real news. I avoid them. I can’t stand them. They don’t add anything. They don’t teach anything. If they go to his house, we don’t learn anything more about the health care debate.” The protest was “too manufactured,” said Von Bergen. “Just a bunch of people going blah-blah-blah.”

By contrast, said Von Bergen, who covered the rowdy town meeting in August where right-wing activists confronted Sen. Arlen Specter, the news value of that event was “readily apparent.” “It involved public figures”—members of Congress. So political reporters picked up the story.

Isn’t Hanway a public figure? we asked. He’s well known in the business community, she said, but not among the general public—a condition that HCAN is trying to change, but can’t do if the media won’t cover their events.

[...]

The town-meeting shouters of August, by contrast, were contentious. Some screamed and hectored, some got embroiled in fist fights, some carried guns. Some carried signs calling Obama a “Nazi” and his plan “socialism”; some warned that “Obamacare” would “pull the plug on grandma.” They understood that the standard template for protest stories is the crime story. They cracked the reportorial code: By behaving extravagantly and precipitating clashes, they made news.

It’s an old story, immortalized in the slogan, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This idea of newsworthiness has the unintended effect of coaxing protest movements toward raising the action ante.

The problem, of course, is that if liberals even slightly raised their voices they'd be tased to within an inch of their lives, if not worse. And if they didn't happen to be middle aged white people, they'd be in real trouble. You know how this works.

I'm not saying that HCAN's methods are necessarily good ones. But the difference between how the newspeople view the two contrived political events is not just a matter of "if it bleeds it leads." The teabaggers are deemed legitimate and the HCAN protesters aren't even though everyone has known from the beginning that the teabaggers were organized via astroturf outfits.

The default is always to Real Americans, no matter how unreal they really are.

Mandate For A Backlash

Digby — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:19:13 -0700

Dean Baker raises a very important point about health care reform without a public option: what happens to the mandate? He argues that for political reasons, if they jettison the public plan, the Democrats should not include mandates either, since they will only line the pockets of the insurance companies until the political pressure becomes so great that a public option will have to be formed anyway. The best thing would be to get rid of mandates now and bring that day closer.

In my view the Democrats are playing with fire in the worst way if they institute mandates without offering any option for reasonably priced insurance. In effect, they will be telling all the people who are currently uninsured that unless they buy unaffordable policies upfront (for which they may receive some money back at the end of the year when they file their taxes) that they must not just live in fear of getting sick as they already do --- they are now criminals. I can't think of a more politically inflammatory thing to do at a time like this. And the right will demagogue this thing in a way that makes Sicko look subtle by comparison.

I've always thought it was a political risk to create a new law that forced people to give money to insurance companies. It's worked in auto insurance, but there's a completely different set of risk factors involved and the costs are much more manageable for the average person. To get rid of the cost control mechanism while keeping the mandate is a recipe for political backlash.

Baker says:

We know that it will be necessary to revisit health care in the not too future in any case. The lack of mandates will help to ensure that this date comes sooner. Then we can talk about measures that will allow us to control costs, like a robust public plan.

But, if we can't get a public plan in this round, why should progressives be pushing for a regressive tax that will go into the pockets of the insurance companies and their overpaid CEOs? Let the insurance companies try to make a living in the market, when they grow up and feel strong enough to compete with a public plan, then we can have mandates.

And, if it is necessary to agree to mandates to get insurance reform through this round, then we should at least be clear what is going on. The insurance companies' employees in Congress will insist on taxing workers to line their bosses pockets.

That's certainly how it will be framed by the right --- and I can't see how anyone could argue with them. Insurance "reform" will end up being defined as the government acting in concert with the insurance companies to force Americans to buy their expensive product --- and it will play perfectly into the right wing populist argument that's gaining currency. Without a public plan as a low cost option, this thing looks a lot less like reform and a whole lot more like a shake down. I could see the rebranded Newtie Populist Republicans using that against all these Blue Dogs and Corporate Senators next time and taking them out. Personally, I'd be hard pressed to say they were wrong.

It was never going to be easy to sell mandates, but they are making it substantially harder if they tank the public plan. They're another stupid compromise anyway, made before anyone even got to the table, just like single payer --- health care should be paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy (who are the only ones winning in this godforsaken economy anymore) and the elimination of health insurance's obscene profits. But in the interest of "going to the middle" the reformers went with mandates and now, without the public option, they'll be stuck with a regressive tax that's going to be very politically difficult to defend.

If the administration and the congress can't be bothered to stick on the public plan, I see no reason why the left should stick with mandates.

Building The Progressive Road

Digby — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:57:53 -0700

One of progressive politics' greatest challenges is to continue to evolve and expand even as its allies in government are in power. All the incentives change and motives and direction get complicated. It's a nice problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless.

This AFN conference is a study in how that's developing and it's looking pretty good. People are starting to adjust to being out of purely oppositional mode and beginning to create institutions and mechanisms to push the progressive agenda from the outside in. Yesterday, I attended a fascinating discussion featuring Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee,Mike Lux, author, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be and Progressive Strategies, LLC, Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), Stephanie Taylor, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Darcy Burner, Progressive Change Campaign Committee. This talk was basically about how new groups like the PCCC are going to go about making the Democratic party more responsive to progressives.

Periello and Burner, both having run tough campaigns as progressives in red districts shared their experiences and had a lot of excellent pointers for candidates. Burner, who lost her race and is now working in DC on creating some new progressive networking capabilities, said that progressive candidates need to have their own ecosystem and work together and also create feedback with the movement itself for a multiplier effect. Periello said that you have to make the progressive case during the campaign, and Lux said you have to be willing to wage a fight.

These things all seem fairly obvious when you see them written down, but what was interesting was their stories about how difficult it was to actually do those obvious things. Progressivism has been so marginalized in mainstream politics that there has literally been no road to run on.

Luckily that seems to be changing. With the work of institutions like CAF, which provides an important issue forum for progressives to draw upon and new groups like Adam Green's PCCC, which seeks to give practical guidance on the ground to progressive candidates so they can do all those things that Periello and Burner found to be valuable in their campaigns, the progressive movement is entering a new phase. It's going to be an interesting and rewarding time if it all comes together.

War Without End

Digby — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:01:00 -0700

Marcy Wheeler hosted a panel on torture at the AFN conference featuring Rep. Jerry Nadler and Christopher Anders of the ACLU, in which Nadler set forth a couple of ideas that are illuminating about the thinking among political players on the subject.

Marcy writes about one of them here:

Yesterday, Jerrold Nadler announced he will hold a hearing on state secrets on Thursday.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY-08), Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, will chair a legislative hearing on H. R. 984, the State Secret Protection Act of 2009, his bill to reform the state secret privilege. This hearing will examine the standard of review for what qualifies as a state secret and how best this privilege should be reformed. The hearing will take place on Thursday, June 4th at 2:00pm in Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2141, Washington, D.C.

The state secret privilege allows the government to withhold evidence in litigation if its disclosure would harm national security. The purpose of the privilege is to protect legitimate state secrets; but if not properly policed, it can be abused to conceal embarrassing or unlawful conduct whose disclosure poses no genuine threat to national security. Nadler's bipartisan bill, the State Secret Protection Act of 2009, co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Petri (WI-6), would ensure meaningful judicial review of the privilege and prevent premature dismissal of claims. The bill aims to curb abuse of the privilege while protecting valid state secrets.

As it happens, at the same time they announced this, Nadler was speaking on a panel with me about accountability for torture (I'm looking for video--but it may take a while to find it). And he focused closely on state secrets.

Interestingly, he was speaking of state secrets as a means of accountability for not just torture but (obviously) illegal wiretapping.

Mind you, Nadler is also pushing for an independent prosecutor on torture, so he's not proposing lawsuits as the sole means for accountability. But he's thinking of it as a means for accountability.

It seems there are a few problems with that. First, timing. Yes, if state secrets were changed, Binyam Mohamad's suits could move forward. But for others, a lawsuit would just begin to wend its ways through the courts, but take years and years to resolve.

Furthermore, it's not just state secrets that protects the wrong-doers. It's also protections of federal employees from suit. While a lawsuit might expose the wrong-doing of the Bush Administration, it's not going to land Dick Cheney in jail.

Nadler is a stalwart fighter of the good fight on these issues, so this isn't critical of him. It seemed to me to be a reluctant acceptance that the only place where we can probably expect any kind of accountability --- and clearly not any kind of criminal liability --- is in the civil courts. It's a damning admission of the uselessness of the congress in these matters but I think it's sadly realistic.

I was also struck by Nadler's commentary about the prospect of preventive detention. As a civil libertarian he is obviously not in favor of such a thing, but his solution was somehat odd. He claimed that the Guantanamo prisoners should be considered POWs, even though they weren't captured wearing a uiform, which at first blush sounds reasonable. After all, if they are captured on a battlefield shooting at soldiers in what both sides consider a war, they should be prisoners of war and according to the Geneva Conventions could be held for the duration.

The problem is that there's no mechanism for "winning" this war --- or surrendering. If bin Laden emerged from a "spidey hole" tomorrow, it would be meaningless for this purpose. There's no land to occupy and no one with whom to negotiate a settlement. We could just theoretically declare the "war" to be over, but I would guess that's about as likely as declaring that Swedish is the new official language of the US. All of this just adds up to POW status being indefinite detention by other means.

It's a thorny problem no matter how you look at it, unless the government just simply decides to take their chances that these people can be convicted before an American jury, which if the recent trial of the clearly tortured Jose Padilla is any example, shouldn't be that difficult. My suspicion is that most officials are more afraid of what will come out in a trial rather than the outcome. In Nadler's case, that clearly isn't the aim, but legalizing the prisoner's status to conform to the Geneva Conventions can't solve the problem if the "war" has no mechanism for conclusion. Indeed, the one thing such a thing will do is legalize the notion that the country is permanently at war. And when you think about it, hasn't that been true pretty much since WWII?

And that may be the biggest elephant in the room of all and the one thing nobody wants to talk about --- can America not be at war?

Getting Their Backs On The Public Plan

Digby — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:15:44 -0700

I was talking to Darcy Burner yesterday, who filled me in on the exciting work she's doing as the new head of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation (APCPF), which is:

a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to bring together the collective wisdom of progressives inside and outside of Congress to promote

* peace and global security,
* energy independence,
* environmental sustainability,
* human rights,
* civil liberties and
* the health and economic well-being of us all.

We will serve as a communications, fact finding, research and education center for progressive leaders and other public policy-makers, issue advocates, the media, and the general public inside and outside of Congress.

Check out the web site for more info. It's a much needed pathway for progressive thought and action from many different perspectives to come together and work in new ways with members of congress.

Darcy mentioned to me that this week is an important moment in the health care debate, in which it might be helpful for members of the netroots to weigh in with a little positive reinforcement to the progressive caucus, which has been holding the leadership's feet to the fire on the public plan option. (Everyone pretty much agrees that if that doesn't happen, health care reform will be a meaningless shell game.) I was somewhat surprised frankly (in a good way) to hear the the progressives caucus had pulled together on this one and was actually wielding some clout. They represent over 70 members of congress, which is a big bloc of votes. If they can stick together on the public plan, it will happen.

I think it's pretty clear that netroots types are all more than willing to meet our responsibility to push and criticize and basically be a thorn in the sides of politicians to "make them do it." But it's also important to let them know that we appreciate it when they follow through.

If you have time today or tomorrow to give a progressive caucus rep a call or send an email it would be helpful. They need to know that the public is paying attention and that we have their backs as this debate kicks into high gear. The health care industry is working overtime to whittle away at meaningful health care reform, most especially the public plan which scares them to death. These Congressional Progressives are the people who will ensure that they do not get their way.

If one of these House members is your Congressional Representative, all the better. But contact one or more of them even if they aren't. They need to know that people other than lobbyists and big donors are engaged and informed on this and that we know what's at stake with the public plan.

Write or Call Your Congressional Progressive Caucus Member and tell them you appreciate that they are holding the line on the public plan.

CNN's Fiscal Madness

Digby — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:00:26 -0800

I can't believe what I saw this weekend: CNN showed the Shock Doctrine documentary I.O.U.S.A. It is an amazing piece of propaganda, which, if it isn't designed to destroy any chance of enacting a necessary stimulus, will persuade more than a few Americans that the biggest problem we face at this moment is long term debt caused by entitlements—and nothing short of massive spending cuts can save us.

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Demand that CNN give equal time to progressive solutions to solving the economic crisis. Send an email to CNN anchors Ali Velshi and Christine Romans.

Here's the press release:

Wake up, America! We're on the brink of a financial meltdown. I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.

Throughout history, the American government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes. Wielding candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) helps demystify the nation's financial practices and policies. The film follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he crisscrosses the country explaining America's unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.

With surgical precision, Creadon interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and alarming profile of America's current economic situation. The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.

Creadon uses candid interviews and his featured subjects include Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin, and Paul Volcker, along with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's own David Walker and Bob Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a Foundation grantee.

Pointedly topical and consummately nonpartisan, I.O.U.S.A. drives home the message that the only time for America's financial future is now.

I suspect that people who read this blog know why that's deeply dishonest and why the timing for this crusade couldn't be worse. It's obvious to those who are following this story that what's required to avert a far worse recession and quite possibly a depression, is for the government to do the opposite of what these deficit obsessives say must be done. But I don't think everyone in the country has that understanding.

I say this is a shock doctrine documentary because it is nearly impossible for me to believe that it is a coincidence that the deficit hawks have put together this slick "non-partisan" documentary and well-financed campaign to cut spending at the moment of what many people believe is America's greatest economic peril since the 1930s. They are, quite obviously, attempting to use the crisis to dismantle the social safety net and avoid doing the real work of reforming the financial system. Shock Doctrine 101.

And when I say slick and non-partisan, it really is. The show also featured a panel with none other than the smarmy village saint Bill Bradley and the Clinton-era deficit maven Alice Rivlin. Of course, it also included hedge fund king and deficit fetishist Pete Peterson and his little dog ex-Government Accountability Office chief David Walker. (Walker seems to be halfway aware that he might not be on the right track, but he's committed to this project.)

It couldn't be more in keeping with the post-partisan, non-ideological zeitgeist. Except it's ideological to the core.

One would think this message is so dissonant that no one could possibly find it persuasive. After all, they are worrying about some potential future catastrophic event while we are in middle of a current calamity. But it's actually very clever—you can see by the press release that it sounds like they are talking about the current problem, even though their prescription is exactly the opposite of what is required . Indeed the diabolical effect of this project and its timing is that it's designed to make people believe that government spending is the cause of the current economic crisis.

And it's smart. What they are prescribing makes more intuitive sense to many people than what is actually necessary to solve the problem. We are all coming to terms with the fact that we are going to have to stop spending beyond our means and pay down our debt in order to get our financial houses in order. Why shouldn't the government have to do the same thing, especially if it's facing an imminent "balloon payment" with all those retirees and sick people getting ready to explode the debt? We all know that the government has been spending like drunken sailors and it stands to reason that's why we find ourselves in this crisis, right?

The sainted Bill Bradley said it right out on the program:

People understand that if they run up debts in their own lives, it's no different than when the government runs up debts the same way.

Americans have been mentally trained over the past few decades to believe drivel like that—the free market is always the preferred method to solve economic problems, that the government should be run like a business (or your household budget) and, most importantly, that government is the cause of problems, not the solution. This deficit obsession plays into all those beliefs and makes it very difficult to explain in the middle of the crisis that the government isn't a business or a household and needs to go further into debt in periods when everyone else is trying to escape it. And, needless to say, it also sounds like the tax 'n spend libruls are at it again.

I'm sure it hasn't escaped anyone's notice that the deficit scolds are coming out of the woodwork now that the Republicans brought us to the brink, slashing taxes for the wealthy, larding their own contributors with earmarks, solidifying the notion that military industrial complex spending is a sacred, untouchable icon, and fetishing and deregulating the market until they finally brought the whole system to its knees. They certainly didn't say much about the debt while it was adding up these last eight years.

They did the same thing during the 80s, which is why Cheney uttered "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. (What was left out was "for Republicans." Democrats are endlessly and relentlessly harassed about deficits --- as they clean up the big mess the deficit spending Republicans leave behind.)

They've reanimated the yellow peril, which is only fitting. Last time, we were told that Japan was taking over the country by buying up all of our real estate. This time it's the Chinese buying up all our bonds. (In 92, Perot put a little zesty mexican salsa in the recipe.) It's always something. The foreigners are going to kill us in our beds unless we cut social security and medicare. And if we even think of enacting any new "entitlements" (a conservative buzzword designed to make you think people are getting something they don't really deserve) it's pretty clear that the Asian hordes are going to destroy our way of life (if the muslims don't get to us first.)

One of the fundamental characteristics of shock doctrine economics is extreme complexity for which a simple, intuitive solution is proposed. It's hard to argue with and it's hard to resist. Here are famous people who really seem to understand what's going on and the solutions they propose just seem like common sense. Even Joe the plumber can see how right their view is. Unfortunately, they're completely wrong --- at least if you care about the country as a whole and the suffering of the millions of people who will have to endure their "solutions."

It's highly unlikely that they will fully have their way on this. We are in deep shit and there are a lot of very smart people who know the deficit is the least of our problems at the moment and that "entitlement reform" is one sure way to deepen the panic and make personal spending contract further than it needs to. (There's a lot of wealth among seniors and near seniors. I can't imagine that chit-chat about how social security is going broke is particularly good news to people who've just lost a good portion of their portfolios in the real estate plunge and the stock market crash.)

But these people are going to cause trouble, which comes as no surprise to me. I've been writing about this for years. It's one of the reasons why I believe in liberal rhetoric (and, yes, the dreaded "ideology.") If you don't bother to educate people counter to the myths and propaganda they hear from the right, they have nothing to hold onto except faith in the Democrats in the face of arguments that have been built layer by layer over many years. (And having faith in Democrats really take courage.) The fact that they refuse to do this doesn't automatically spell failure for democratic policies, but it makes it many times harder to succeed.

They don't even seem to intend to do tank the stimulus, just restrict it. What they are doing is setting the stage for entitlement cuts and a swift, premature pullback on government spending --- thus extending the crisis. And if the Democrats are cowed by these people (they always are --- they hate being called spendthrifts) there will be enough egomaniacs in the congress to hamstring the administration and force them to adopt these "common sense" methods of running the economy --- which is precisely how we got into this problem in the first place.

*In case you would like a more erudite argument against deficit hawkishness at a time like this, here's James Galbraith on the subject. (I wonder if he's still so sanguine about the Peterson Foundation now.)

Update: Here's a post I wrote some time back about the long term crusade to destroy social security. This part is relevant:

[Ronald Reagan said back in the 1960s]:

But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?

That was forty years ago. Later, in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan's indiscreet budget director David Stockman admitted that the purpose of ginning up the social security crisis was "to permit the politicians to make it look like they are doing something for the beneficiary population when they are doing something to it, which they normally would not have the courage to undertake." And then with masterful chutzpah, considering his famous "Choice" speech from 1964 excerpted above, Ronnie then went on to use the so-called "looming" SS crisis to great effect --- he flogged the GOP contention that the program was insolvent (as they'd been doing for fifty years) and also raised the payroll taxes which they immediately raided to cover their budget deficit. And now, lo and behold, we are "in crisis" again. Imagine that. Brilliant.

I guess if you repeat a lie long enough, it might actually come true some day. But let's just say that those who say that social security is going broke and that "entitlements" must be reformed haven't been right for decades and they aren't likely to be right this time.

We have a real crisis on our hands, but this crap is a very clever sleight of hand --- the problem, as we all know, is free market ideology run amok. If they can misdirect the public to "reforming government" instead, they might be able to take the heat off enough to get back in the saddle before anyone notices.

Update II: From George Stephanopoulos' interview with Obama on Sunday: It's on the menu:

I asked the president-elect, "At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?"

"Yes," Obama said.

"And when will that get done?" I asked.

"Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?"

"And eventually sacrifice from everyone?" I asked.

"Everybody’s going to have give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin the game," Obama said.

"Structural deficit" is the exact wording used in I.O.U.S.A.

FDR went with "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," but Obama is adopting "everybody's going to have to have to sacrifice." It's an unusual way to get people through a period of extreme economic insecurity, but maybe it will be character building. It's certainly better than insisting that the fundamentals are strong.

Update II: From the AP today:

Out of power, Republicans appear to be retreating to familiar old ground. They're becoming deficit hawks again.

GOP lawmakers didn't seem to mind enjoying the fruits of government largesse for the past eight years while one of their own was in the White House. Now they're struggling to regain footing at a time of economic rout, a record $1.2 trillion budget deficit and an incoming Democratic president claiming a mandate for change.

It might not be the best time for running against more government spending. But that hasn't stopped Republicans from casting themselves as protectors of the public purse, striving for relevancy as Congress tackles President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus legislation.

"Congress cannot keep writing checks and simply pass IOUs to our children and grandchildren," says Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. Asks House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio: "How much debt are we going to pile on future generations?"

[...]

Republicans "seem to be on a funny tightrope on which they're trying to enunciate a Republican position," said Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. "They're saying, `Yes it is a crisis', and `yes, a lot has to be done. But it shouldn't be too much. And it shouldn't be imprudent.' They seem to be stuck with platitudes and truisms."

That's why the "elder statesmen" like Peterson and the members of the Concord Coalition are trotted out after the Republicans have disgraced themselves and spent the country into oblivion. They represent "bipartisan" consensus that pressures the Dems to abandon any economic policies that stand to hurt the wealthy when the Republicans are weak. That's their job.

If you doubt what they are up to, ask yourself why they didn't say a word over the past eight years about the shennanigans on wall street or the deficit as it was being run up by the Republicans. I think their lack of credibility is pretty obvious.