Don’t rely on the summaries and spin of other people, take an hour and watch and listening to Obama’s Cairo speech and form your own judgments. I found it extraordinary.
He’s changing peoples’ hearts, which as we’ve learned is how you change the world. It won’t happen over night. But how much better the world would be now if this speech had been given by the US president as part of our immediate response to the events of September 11, 2001.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
the new new deal
Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.
A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.
At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”
I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further.
And I’ve already commented at length on the “torture debate.” (Is it torture to shackle someone naked to the ceiling of a cold cell in an excruciatingly painful position so he can’t sleep for eleven days? “Views differ.”)
Another Republican myth that seems to have become entrenched in their alternative reality in recent months is actually the revival of a classic from … oh, fifty or sixty years ago: The New Deal was a failure. As is typical with these kinds of things, there is the weak form and the strong form. (Like the idea that tax cuts result in gushing tax revenue. The weak form of this Republican myth is that tax cuts merely pay for themselves – or maybe just almost pay for themselves. The strong form is that they will result in a big increase in tax revenue that will actually balance the budget.) The weak form of this one is that the New Deal didn’t do much of anything to help us recover from the Great Depression. The strong form is that the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression.
Then there is the crazy form. For this, I give you Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), the Sarah Palin of Congress. From a speech on the House floor last week (here is the video):
It is probably also worth pointing out that the “Roaring ‘20’s” (“where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we never seen before in the history of the country”) were what we call a “bubble,” with wild speculation in the financial markets that resulted in … the CRASH of 1929. Michelle actually stumbles upon a decent point here. The Republican laissez-faire economic policies of the ’20’s, resulting in an unsustainable speculative bubble, can probably be seen as a historical parallel to the de-regulatory policies that reach their peak under George W. Bush.
The crazy humor in this speech, however, is the bit about the “Hoot-Smalley Act” which she attributes to FDR. There is a nice little bit of Palinesque gibberish: “Hoot-Smalley” was a “tremendous burden on tariff restrictions.” Huh? Oh, and the act was actually the “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.” Which was named after its two Republican sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon). And then there is the fact that the act was signed into law in 1930 by the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, almost three years before FDR took office.
The Republican rediscovery of the New Deal as an economic boogeyman has certainly been fueled by the constant references in recent months to our current financial crisis being “the worst since the Great Depression” as well as by President Obama’s energetic response, which is similar to the FDR’s economic activism. But the Bible of this revisionism is the book “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes, which takes the view that the New Deal was counterproductive and prolonged the Great Depression. Shlaes, a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, is not an economist and the book, which is largely anecdotal, has few actual statistics in it. It has drawn fire from economist Paul Krugman, among others. But Republicans can’t get enough of it.
From Politico (“Why GOP is Devouring One Book”):
Shlaes builds her case largely around the fact that unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the Depression, a fact she exaggerates by disregarding official unemployment statistics and coming up with her own that subtract all the government jobs created during the New Deal. Now it is true that unemployment was slow to decline from its peak during the Depression. But Shlaes goes further and argues, in effect, “The New Deal didn’t create many jobs if you don’t count the jobs it actually created.”
Unemployment actually fell pretty impressively during FDR’s first term, from 25% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937. But in 1937, FDR reacted to concerns about the growing federal budget deficit by cutting spending too much, too soon, which plunged the country back into a “recession within the Depression” in 1937 and 1938, with unemployment rising back up to 19%. Federal spending actually declined by over 26% during those two years. Rather than taking from this experience the lesson that you shouldn’t slam the brakes on prematurely when the economy is still weak, Shlaes cites the state of the economy at the end of 1938 as evidence that the New Deal failed.
Shlaes uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average as her primary metric for gauging the state of the economy at any given time during the Depression – a rather dodgy metric. She pretty much avoids discussion of GDP altogether. And it’s obvious why. Because GDP grew impressively under FDR. Indeed, you can probably refute the New Deal revisionists with just this one graph:
[click to enlarge]
Between August 1929 and March 1933, GDP declined by almost 33%. It hit bottom just after FDR took office and exceeded the previous high three years later in 1936 (growing by over 14% that year).
So, according to this new Republican narrative, what was it that finally brought an end to the Great Depression? Because it did eventually end, right? Here the revisionist narrative merges (sort of) with mainstream economics. Both agree that it was World War II that finally ended the Great Depression once and for all. (Technically, the Depression ended in 1933, we just didn’t return to full employment until WWII.) I received an email a while back from a prominent Seattle investment advisor who slipped this little bit of partisan punditry into his commentary on the Obama stimulus: “[M]any economists are rethinking whether the massive federal spending [during the New Deal] helped bring an end to the depression, or whether WWII was the true catalyst for economic recovery.”
Think about that for a moment. How does World War II ending the Great Depression refute the notion that “massive government spending” doesn’t help stimulate economic recovery?
What happened during WWII? Federal spending and the deficit exploded. Federal spending increased to $97 billion in 1944, up almost fifteen times from $6.5 billion in 1940. But tax receipts only increased about fivefold, leaving a gargantuan deficit. The national debt increased six fold from $43 billion in 1940 to $260 billion at the end of the war. As a percentage of GDP, the national debt increased from 52% in 1940 to 121% in 1946 (see graph below), a level never reached before or since.
[click to enlarge]Now, I know Republicans think we should always increase military spending, even if we are already spending more on our military than the rest of the world combined. (Just as we should always cut taxes, even if we are fighting two wars and running record budget deficits.) But is there something about spending to fight a war – blowing things up and killing people – that is inherently more stimulative (let alone productive) than, say, developing alternative energy sources, or building a national high-speed rail system, or bringing medical records into the 21st Century? From a spending standpoint, World War II was just the New Deal on steroids and seems to support the view that FDR’s spending programs were too modest during the Great Depression.
The post-War prosperity was built on the foundation of the GI Bill that sent a generation to college and encouraged home ownership. How is that support for neo-Hooverist policies? And why do we need a war to provide the kind of stimulus required to get us back on a path of robust economic growth? (We already have two wars going on, of course, but from a spending standpoint they can’t hold a candle to WWII.) Why not spending on building the national infrastructure required for us to exert global economic leadership well into the 21st Century? Is anything more important than a new energy infrastructure (that frees us from the Saudis, Hugo Chavez, Iran and Dick Cheney, and propels us into the lead in the technologies that are going to drive economic growth for decades), fixing our health care system (which, by almost any metric, costs vastly more and produces woefully worse results, than that of any other major developed country), and bringing our schools (uniformly) back up to global standards. Is military spending somehow a better use of funds? If this crisis – with vast portions of our economy idle or under-employed and the risk of a major global implosion – isn’t enough to prompt a major national effort to re-build, what will it take?
Alas, to have a conversation of this sort assumes everyone shares at least a certain factual baseline – some means of judging the quality of various propositions.
But, then, why unnecessarily constrain ourselves. After all, everyone is entitled to his own facts. Let the “debate” continue.
Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.
A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.
At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”
I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further.
And I’ve already commented at length on the “torture debate.” (Is it torture to shackle someone naked to the ceiling of a cold cell in an excruciatingly painful position so he can’t sleep for eleven days? “Views differ.”)
Another Republican myth that seems to have become entrenched in their alternative reality in recent months is actually the revival of a classic from … oh, fifty or sixty years ago: The New Deal was a failure. As is typical with these kinds of things, there is the weak form and the strong form. (Like the idea that tax cuts result in gushing tax revenue. The weak form of this Republican myth is that tax cuts merely pay for themselves – or maybe just almost pay for themselves. The strong form is that they will result in a big increase in tax revenue that will actually balance the budget.) The weak form of this one is that the New Deal didn’t do much of anything to help us recover from the Great Depression. The strong form is that the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression.
Then there is the crazy form. For this, I give you Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), the Sarah Palin of Congress. From a speech on the House floor last week (here is the video):
“[T]he recession that FDR had to deal with wasn't as bad as the recession Coolidge had to deal with in the early '20s. Yet, the prescription that Coolidge put on that, from history, is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the roaring '20s where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we never seen before in the history of the country.Now there are just a few problems with this narrative. Primarily, there is the notion that FDR “took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression.” During the Great Depression, unemployment reached its peak of 25% in 1933, the year FDR took office. Similarly, GDP bottomed out in 1933 at almost 33% below its peak in 1929 and began rising thereafter. (More on this below.)
"FDR applied just the opposite formula -- the Hoot-Smalley Act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions, and then, of course, trade barriers and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That's what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking."
It is probably also worth pointing out that the “Roaring ‘20’s” (“where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we never seen before in the history of the country”) were what we call a “bubble,” with wild speculation in the financial markets that resulted in … the CRASH of 1929. Michelle actually stumbles upon a decent point here. The Republican laissez-faire economic policies of the ’20’s, resulting in an unsustainable speculative bubble, can probably be seen as a historical parallel to the de-regulatory policies that reach their peak under George W. Bush.
The crazy humor in this speech, however, is the bit about the “Hoot-Smalley Act” which she attributes to FDR. There is a nice little bit of Palinesque gibberish: “Hoot-Smalley” was a “tremendous burden on tariff restrictions.” Huh? Oh, and the act was actually the “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.” Which was named after its two Republican sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon). And then there is the fact that the act was signed into law in 1930 by the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, almost three years before FDR took office.
The Republican rediscovery of the New Deal as an economic boogeyman has certainly been fueled by the constant references in recent months to our current financial crisis being “the worst since the Great Depression” as well as by President Obama’s energetic response, which is similar to the FDR’s economic activism. But the Bible of this revisionism is the book “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes, which takes the view that the New Deal was counterproductive and prolonged the Great Depression. Shlaes, a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, is not an economist and the book, which is largely anecdotal, has few actual statistics in it. It has drawn fire from economist Paul Krugman, among others. But Republicans can’t get enough of it.
From Politico (“Why GOP is Devouring One Book”):
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession.
“There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide Mike Ference, whose boss, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, invited Shlaes to join a group of 20 or so other House Republicans for lunch earlier this year in his Capitol suite.
“Republicans are gobbling it up — and so are other lawmakers — because it tells you what they did, what worked and what didn’t.”
“It’s been suggested as required reading for all of us, I think,” said Erica Elliott, press secretary for Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) — who himself notes that his chief of staff “stole” his hardback copy, so he had to purchase a paperback.
Garrett said the book “is a good read” that details, among other things, “how FDR engaged in vitriolic demonizing of Wall Street and Big Business to advance his agenda.” …
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who invited Shlaes to address the Conservative Opportunity Society earlier this year, uses words like “definitive” when referring to the tome, noting that Shlaes wrote it before the economic meltdown and that he read it “before we saw this even coming.”
“I think it’s conclusive when you read the book, although I don’t believe she said so, that the New Deal was actually a bad deal, and today we have a president who believes that the New Deal was a good deal, and would have been a far better deal if FDR would have spent a lot more money,” he said.
Shlaes builds her case largely around the fact that unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the Depression, a fact she exaggerates by disregarding official unemployment statistics and coming up with her own that subtract all the government jobs created during the New Deal. Now it is true that unemployment was slow to decline from its peak during the Depression. But Shlaes goes further and argues, in effect, “The New Deal didn’t create many jobs if you don’t count the jobs it actually created.”
Unemployment actually fell pretty impressively during FDR’s first term, from 25% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937. But in 1937, FDR reacted to concerns about the growing federal budget deficit by cutting spending too much, too soon, which plunged the country back into a “recession within the Depression” in 1937 and 1938, with unemployment rising back up to 19%. Federal spending actually declined by over 26% during those two years. Rather than taking from this experience the lesson that you shouldn’t slam the brakes on prematurely when the economy is still weak, Shlaes cites the state of the economy at the end of 1938 as evidence that the New Deal failed.
Shlaes uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average as her primary metric for gauging the state of the economy at any given time during the Depression – a rather dodgy metric. She pretty much avoids discussion of GDP altogether. And it’s obvious why. Because GDP grew impressively under FDR. Indeed, you can probably refute the New Deal revisionists with just this one graph:
[click to enlarge]
Between August 1929 and March 1933, GDP declined by almost 33%. It hit bottom just after FDR took office and exceeded the previous high three years later in 1936 (growing by over 14% that year).
So, according to this new Republican narrative, what was it that finally brought an end to the Great Depression? Because it did eventually end, right? Here the revisionist narrative merges (sort of) with mainstream economics. Both agree that it was World War II that finally ended the Great Depression once and for all. (Technically, the Depression ended in 1933, we just didn’t return to full employment until WWII.) I received an email a while back from a prominent Seattle investment advisor who slipped this little bit of partisan punditry into his commentary on the Obama stimulus: “[M]any economists are rethinking whether the massive federal spending [during the New Deal] helped bring an end to the depression, or whether WWII was the true catalyst for economic recovery.”
Think about that for a moment. How does World War II ending the Great Depression refute the notion that “massive government spending” doesn’t help stimulate economic recovery?
What happened during WWII? Federal spending and the deficit exploded. Federal spending increased to $97 billion in 1944, up almost fifteen times from $6.5 billion in 1940. But tax receipts only increased about fivefold, leaving a gargantuan deficit. The national debt increased six fold from $43 billion in 1940 to $260 billion at the end of the war. As a percentage of GDP, the national debt increased from 52% in 1940 to 121% in 1946 (see graph below), a level never reached before or since.
[click to enlarge]Now, I know Republicans think we should always increase military spending, even if we are already spending more on our military than the rest of the world combined. (Just as we should always cut taxes, even if we are fighting two wars and running record budget deficits.) But is there something about spending to fight a war – blowing things up and killing people – that is inherently more stimulative (let alone productive) than, say, developing alternative energy sources, or building a national high-speed rail system, or bringing medical records into the 21st Century? From a spending standpoint, World War II was just the New Deal on steroids and seems to support the view that FDR’s spending programs were too modest during the Great Depression.The post-War prosperity was built on the foundation of the GI Bill that sent a generation to college and encouraged home ownership. How is that support for neo-Hooverist policies? And why do we need a war to provide the kind of stimulus required to get us back on a path of robust economic growth? (We already have two wars going on, of course, but from a spending standpoint they can’t hold a candle to WWII.) Why not spending on building the national infrastructure required for us to exert global economic leadership well into the 21st Century? Is anything more important than a new energy infrastructure (that frees us from the Saudis, Hugo Chavez, Iran and Dick Cheney, and propels us into the lead in the technologies that are going to drive economic growth for decades), fixing our health care system (which, by almost any metric, costs vastly more and produces woefully worse results, than that of any other major developed country), and bringing our schools (uniformly) back up to global standards. Is military spending somehow a better use of funds? If this crisis – with vast portions of our economy idle or under-employed and the risk of a major global implosion – isn’t enough to prompt a major national effort to re-build, what will it take?
Alas, to have a conversation of this sort assumes everyone shares at least a certain factual baseline – some means of judging the quality of various propositions.
But, then, why unnecessarily constrain ourselves. After all, everyone is entitled to his own facts. Let the “debate” continue.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
the "torture debate"
The phrase “torture debate” is one I never thought I would use in the context of US domestic politics. It is fair to say that until a few years ago, it would have never occurred to any significant element of the US population to openly support torture by our own government. Our unequivocal opposition to torture is even enshrined in our founding document, the US Constitution, which (in the Eight Amendment) prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet, incredibly, we now have the leaders and rank-and-file of one of our two major political parties almost unanimously arguing – not in the shadows or in defensive, apologetic terms, but publicly and stridently – in support of torture.
As recently as 2003, at the time of the capture of Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush said:
Invoking torture was the harshest possible condemnation of Saddam’s regime – the implication being that any leader who engages in state-sanctioned torture forfeits his legitimacy. Who knew that at the very time Bush was speaking those words, his own administration was engaged in torture (and operating secret prisons). (Psychologists have a word for this: Projection.)
When Bush was in power, the right abandoned almost all limitations on the executive in favor or an almost unfettered authoritarianism. It now appears they have also abandoned all moral bearings. The party that proclaims itself to be “pro-life” and in favor of “small government” has chosen to define itself by asserting the right of the executive to torture – in secret, of course, with no oversights by courts, Congress or the public. (I saw one piece in recent days that actually referred to the Bush administration’s torture practices as a “moral imperative,” presumably on the basis of some sort of narrow utilitarian calculus. Cheney is proclaiming that torture works! Talk about “moral relativism.”)
One right-winger who has included me on his email distribution list was out among the teabaggers on April 15th, declaring Obama’s proposal to increase taxes by 3% on the top 5% richest taxpayers to be tantamount to “fascism.” And only a few days later, he was directing his free-floating, middle-aged, white male, right-wing anger toward Obama’s discontinuation and (partial) exposure of Bush’s torture policies. Who says irony is dead?
There was no “torture debate” during World War II, which resulted in almost a half a million US deaths. As President Obama noted in his press conference yesterday:
Just to be clear: Torture is illegal. Period. No exceptions. It is illegal under US law and under treaties that the US has signed and ratified. That is a legal stance shared by all civilized countries. We are a nation of laws and no one in government – not even Dick Cheney – is free to disregard those laws. So the “debate” should end there. If Republicans REALLY want to torture, they should go about it legally, and get Congress to pass and the president to sign a new law or laws that repeal current prohibitions on torture.
During the period in question Republicans controlled both Congress and the executive. If they wanted to legalize torture they could have attempted to make it legal. (Of course, such an attempt to legalize torture would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Eight Amendment. A Constitutional amendment would have been required.) Instead, the Bush administration insisted at the time that we DON’T torture.
Bush told the American people on multiple occasions (and long after his administration had begun to engage in torture):
So Bush & co. not only broke the law, they lied to the American people about it. The justifications for torture only came about after it became undeniable that we had engaged in it and that it was official policy, approved at the highest levels of our government (not just the rogue behavior of “a few bad apples”).
There is no “commander in chief” exception to US laws, as the Bush administration and its supporters among the authoritarian right have argued. The Founders put the executive branch in Article II of the Constitution. Article I is the legislative branch. That is because we are a country of laws and those laws – passed by Congress and signed by the president – dictate what the executive branch can and cannot do. The Founders made it clear in the Constitution. Article II says that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Yes, the president is commander in chief of the armed forces. Which means only that he is at the top of the military chain of command. But Congress is given the power to make the rules for our armed forces. Article I in enumerating the powers of Congress lists, “To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”. Nothing in the Constitution even remotely suggests that the commander in chief authority somehow gives the president the right to disregard any law he wants as long as he does it as the head of the military (that would, after all, make us essentially a military dictatorship). Just the opposite – the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate the military. (It’s ironic that “conservatives” who are always insisting on a “strict construction” of the words of the Constitution are willing to take the commander in chief authority and expand it to override everything else in the Constitution, giving the president unfettered power.)
It is worth noting, by the way, that most of the torture – or at least the worst of it – appears to have taken place under the auspices of the CIA – a civilian branch of government – not the military. So it is pretty hard to argue that the president’s power as commander in chief of the military gives him the power to order civilian branches of government to break the law. But that is the argument that Republicans are making these days.
[click to enlarge]
[See the Tom Tomorrow cartoon archive here.]
We’ve had a lot of information about our torture practices come out in recent weeks – it’s hard to keep track of it all. There was the leaked Report of the Red Cross (which is the entity charged with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions) on US detention practices, which concluded, “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture”. And the infamous Torture Memos from the Bush “Justice” Department. And the unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody released last week.
I’m not going to even begin to attempt to summarize all we have learned in recent weeks. But I will offer some observations.
To really appreciate our loss of moral bearings, just look at the language that’s being used – euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And “stress positions.” Sounds like you’re trying to figure out if you can get out of work on time to pick up the kids before day care closes. But what it ACTUALLY means is being bound in excruciatingly painful positions for unbearably long periods of time. In other words, it means TORTURE.
Or “sleep deprivation.” Sounds like a night of too much scotch and cocaine (e.g., Dubya when he was “young and irresponsible” – meaning, before he entered politics). But what it ACTUALLY means is being forced to stay awake for as long as eleven days. That’s right – ELEVEN DAYS. It’s right there – explicitly – in the 2002 torture memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee (who was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – one notch below the Supreme Court).
What do you have to DO to a person to keep him awake for ELEVEN DAYS? Nothing completely destroys a person’s psyche more thoroughly than sleep deprivation. That is WHY it is used as a means of torture. Because it is one of the most extreme and destructive methods of torture. Sadists over the centuries have learned its effectiveness.
And according to the torture memos while you are at it, you can destroy the individual’s sense of dignity and autonomy by imprisoning him NAKED. Just to make it clear he has NO POWER, maybe douse him with freezing water. Because, ultimately, torture is all about POWER.
According to the Bush “Justice” Department you can combine all these torture techniques. And you almost HAVE to. About the only way to keep a guy awake for ELEVEN DAYS is “stress positions.” Want an example? Look at the last panel in the cartoon above. That is taken from the Red Cross Report. Philip Zelikow was executive director of the 9-11 Commission and a top aide to former Secretary of State Rice. He writes in Foreign Policy that the “focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program”:
Speaking of Zelikow, he is something of an expert on the law as it relates to torture and made an attempt to point out to members of the Bush administration that the legal logic of the torture memos was deeply flawed and shouldn’t be relied upon:
It is pretty clear that with torture, as with just about everything else, Bush, Cheney and those around them made aggressive efforts to ensure that no information that challenged their ideology and their actions ever saw the light of day.
As I said, torture is all about POWER. If you can torture someone under your power, you can do ANYTHING. Yes, including murder.
In June of last year, the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that over 100 detainees have died in US custody with up to 27 of them having been ruled to be homicides. Then there are the “disappeareds.” According to Human Rights Watch, 35 suspects known to have been held in secret prisons as far back as 2001 are still unaccounted for. The name of one of those missing prisoners, Hassan Ghul, was apparently accidentally included unredacted in one of the torture memos:
Thanks largely to Dick Cheney, who claimed last week that our torture was a “success,” the “torture debate” has now turned to the question of whether torture “works”.
Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post frames the issue correctly:
For example, the torture memos revealed that two prisoners, Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were waterboarded a total of 266 times. In the case of Zubaydah, that happened in August 2002 – almost a year after 9-11. In the case of KSM, it happened in March 2003 – a year and a half after 9-11. This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario always posited by torture advocates and fans of “24”. In the case of Zubaydah, as Soufan notes, we learned a lot of useful intelligence from him – in March through June of 2002 when the FBI interrogated him with conventional (i.e., non-torture) methods. The torture started thereafter.
Karl Rove and FOX News, among others, have claimed that torture prevented a “West Coast 9-11.” They claim that CIA waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave authorities information used to foil a plot to hijack an airplane with a shoe bomb and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles. But as Timothy Noah in Slate and Daily Kos TV have documented, the Rove timetable just doesn't add up. While KSM was arrested in March 2003, the Los Angeles plot was stopped in February 2002 -- more than a year earlier. Rove's tale is a blatant falsehood.
The New York Times had an article this week on how an ABC News interview in 2007 with a former CIA official skewed the “debate” over waterboarding:
Matthew Alexander was a highly-successful former interrogator who led the team that obtained the intelligence resulting in the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (described in the book, “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq “). Writing in the Washington Post last November, Alexander also refuted the idea that torture is effective and describes part of the downside:
It has become increasingly apparent that most of the “detainees” seized in the “war on terror” were completely innocent. The vast majority were handed over by warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan in return for generous bounties. Some were bad guys, but some were just people the bounty recipient didn’t like – or, indeed, were handed over by a genuine bad guy to cover his own tracks. Since we didn’t capture the guys ourselves, and don’t speak the language or understand the culture, we were really pretty clueless as to the ultimate innocence or guilt of these people. As is typical with bureaucrats everywhere, our government officials didn’t want to admit their mistakes – especially if it would make them appear weak or, God forbid, someone who was released subsequently actually did something bad. The ultimate CYA – lock them up in a lawless black hole and try to forget about them.
As Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson, writes:
And these are the people Rumsfeld called, “the worst of the worst”.
Karl Rove recently said on FOX News (as shown in this great Daily Show clip): “All these techniques have now been ruined.”
This is my favorite argument against letting the American people know that their government has been torturing people. Rove nails it. Now our enemies will know we might torture them so they can train themselves to resist – as a result, the “techniques have now been ruined”. How, exactly, does one “train” to resist ELEVEN DAYS of sleep deprivation brought about through excruciatingly painful “stress positions”? And waterboarding has been a well-known favorite of sadists through the centuries and apparently that hasn’t diminished it continuing popularity. But put that aside. What I like is the premise of Rove’s objection – that we want our government to continue torturing people. Rove, and others like him, have actually stated the best reason FOR a full, public investigation of these torture practices – TO MAKE SURE THIS STUFF NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.
Personally, I think trying to prosecute people for this stuff would be counterproductive. As soon as a special prosecutor was named and a grand jury empanelled, all further releases of information would probably come to a halt because “it is the subject of a criminal investigation.” And I think it would be very hard to secure a conviction given the legal cover provided by the torture memos. It would be Hellish partisan warfare. Better to create an independent Truth Commission that has the power to grant immunity in return for testimony, as was done in South Africa. With immunity, no one can invoke his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. And if they lie or hide evidence (as Cheney’s office did in the Valerie Plame affair), they can be prosecuted for perjury or obstruction of justice (as Scooter Libby was). So EVERYTHING comes out. Let’s put Cheney to the test. If he claims that “torture works,” let’s find out. Get all the facts on the table. At least we can ensure that a truthful historical record is created and that the perpetrators live with their public infamy. And it might help ensure that this type of thing never happens again – at least not in this country.
(I do feel strongly, however, that Jay Bybee, now a Ninth Circuit Appeals Court judge, should be impeached. A war criminal should not hold a lifetime appointment to the second highest court in the land.)
I find it incredible that people who don’t trust the government to deliver the mail would be willing to give the government the power to torture people. In secret, of course. It must be kept secret. Because letting “the enemy” know our methods would “ruin” them.
Do we really want to give any government that power? Including our government?
Trust us. Trust BIG GOVERNMENT. We wouldn’t abuse our secret powers. Just trust us.
The fact that one of our two major political parties is almost unanimously supporting torture is staggering. History will not view this positively
Good thing these people are out of power.
As recently as 2003, at the time of the capture of Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush said:
“For the vast majority of Iraqi citizens who wish to live as free men and women, this event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever.”
Invoking torture was the harshest possible condemnation of Saddam’s regime – the implication being that any leader who engages in state-sanctioned torture forfeits his legitimacy. Who knew that at the very time Bush was speaking those words, his own administration was engaged in torture (and operating secret prisons). (Psychologists have a word for this: Projection.)
When Bush was in power, the right abandoned almost all limitations on the executive in favor or an almost unfettered authoritarianism. It now appears they have also abandoned all moral bearings. The party that proclaims itself to be “pro-life” and in favor of “small government” has chosen to define itself by asserting the right of the executive to torture – in secret, of course, with no oversights by courts, Congress or the public. (I saw one piece in recent days that actually referred to the Bush administration’s torture practices as a “moral imperative,” presumably on the basis of some sort of narrow utilitarian calculus. Cheney is proclaiming that torture works! Talk about “moral relativism.”)
One right-winger who has included me on his email distribution list was out among the teabaggers on April 15th, declaring Obama’s proposal to increase taxes by 3% on the top 5% richest taxpayers to be tantamount to “fascism.” And only a few days later, he was directing his free-floating, middle-aged, white male, right-wing anger toward Obama’s discontinuation and (partial) exposure of Bush’s torture policies. Who says irony is dead?
There was no “torture debate” during World War II, which resulted in almost a half a million US deaths. As President Obama noted in his press conference yesterday:
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "We don't torture," when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.Nor was there a “torture debate” during the Cold War when an evil foe had thousands of nuclear warheads trained on us, haunting us with the specter of sudden nuclear holocaust. But 19 guys with box cutters cause us to abandon everything we stand for? Those bearded fanatics managed to accomplish something neither the Nazis nor the Soviet Union was ever able to do – cause us to voluntarily abandon what it means to be American. How did we manage to survive as a country for over 200 years without state torture?
Just to be clear: Torture is illegal. Period. No exceptions. It is illegal under US law and under treaties that the US has signed and ratified. That is a legal stance shared by all civilized countries. We are a nation of laws and no one in government – not even Dick Cheney – is free to disregard those laws. So the “debate” should end there. If Republicans REALLY want to torture, they should go about it legally, and get Congress to pass and the president to sign a new law or laws that repeal current prohibitions on torture.
During the period in question Republicans controlled both Congress and the executive. If they wanted to legalize torture they could have attempted to make it legal. (Of course, such an attempt to legalize torture would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Eight Amendment. A Constitutional amendment would have been required.) Instead, the Bush administration insisted at the time that we DON’T torture.
Bush told the American people on multiple occasions (and long after his administration had begun to engage in torture):
"No American will be allowed to torture another human being anywhere in the world...."
"This country doesn’t torture, we’re not going to torture."
So Bush & co. not only broke the law, they lied to the American people about it. The justifications for torture only came about after it became undeniable that we had engaged in it and that it was official policy, approved at the highest levels of our government (not just the rogue behavior of “a few bad apples”).
There is no “commander in chief” exception to US laws, as the Bush administration and its supporters among the authoritarian right have argued. The Founders put the executive branch in Article II of the Constitution. Article I is the legislative branch. That is because we are a country of laws and those laws – passed by Congress and signed by the president – dictate what the executive branch can and cannot do. The Founders made it clear in the Constitution. Article II says that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Yes, the president is commander in chief of the armed forces. Which means only that he is at the top of the military chain of command. But Congress is given the power to make the rules for our armed forces. Article I in enumerating the powers of Congress lists, “To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”. Nothing in the Constitution even remotely suggests that the commander in chief authority somehow gives the president the right to disregard any law he wants as long as he does it as the head of the military (that would, after all, make us essentially a military dictatorship). Just the opposite – the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate the military. (It’s ironic that “conservatives” who are always insisting on a “strict construction” of the words of the Constitution are willing to take the commander in chief authority and expand it to override everything else in the Constitution, giving the president unfettered power.)
It is worth noting, by the way, that most of the torture – or at least the worst of it – appears to have taken place under the auspices of the CIA – a civilian branch of government – not the military. So it is pretty hard to argue that the president’s power as commander in chief of the military gives him the power to order civilian branches of government to break the law. But that is the argument that Republicans are making these days.
[click to enlarge][See the Tom Tomorrow cartoon archive here.]
We’ve had a lot of information about our torture practices come out in recent weeks – it’s hard to keep track of it all. There was the leaked Report of the Red Cross (which is the entity charged with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions) on US detention practices, which concluded, “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture”. And the infamous Torture Memos from the Bush “Justice” Department. And the unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody released last week.
I’m not going to even begin to attempt to summarize all we have learned in recent weeks. But I will offer some observations.
To really appreciate our loss of moral bearings, just look at the language that’s being used – euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And “stress positions.” Sounds like you’re trying to figure out if you can get out of work on time to pick up the kids before day care closes. But what it ACTUALLY means is being bound in excruciatingly painful positions for unbearably long periods of time. In other words, it means TORTURE.
Or “sleep deprivation.” Sounds like a night of too much scotch and cocaine (e.g., Dubya when he was “young and irresponsible” – meaning, before he entered politics). But what it ACTUALLY means is being forced to stay awake for as long as eleven days. That’s right – ELEVEN DAYS. It’s right there – explicitly – in the 2002 torture memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee (who was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – one notch below the Supreme Court).
What do you have to DO to a person to keep him awake for ELEVEN DAYS? Nothing completely destroys a person’s psyche more thoroughly than sleep deprivation. That is WHY it is used as a means of torture. Because it is one of the most extreme and destructive methods of torture. Sadists over the centuries have learned its effectiveness.
And according to the torture memos while you are at it, you can destroy the individual’s sense of dignity and autonomy by imprisoning him NAKED. Just to make it clear he has NO POWER, maybe douse him with freezing water. Because, ultimately, torture is all about POWER.
According to the Bush “Justice” Department you can combine all these torture techniques. And you almost HAVE to. About the only way to keep a guy awake for ELEVEN DAYS is “stress positions.” Want an example? Look at the last panel in the cartoon above. That is taken from the Red Cross Report. Philip Zelikow was executive director of the 9-11 Commission and a top aide to former Secretary of State Rice. He writes in Foreign Policy that the “focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program”:
…[w]hich is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time. The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important.Let’s drop the euphemisms. This is what our right-wing authoritarians are defending:
Read the descriptions military personnel provided of prisoners' reactions to "enhanced interrogation": "Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning.... Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself.... Trembled uncontrollably."In the Los Angeles Times today, a co-counsel for one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, describes his treatment in US custody. (At the time, and even now, Zubaydah is described as a top al Qaeda leader. Subsequent reporting in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and by Ron Suskind in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," describe Zubaydah as a minor logistics man, a travel agent, or a personnel clerk.)
He was the first prisoner in the "war on terror" to experience the full gamut of ancient techniques adapted by the communists in Korea and, 50 years later, approved by the Justice Department in Washington. He was the first prisoner to have his interrogations captured on videotape -- a practice the CIA ended in late 2002. Two years later, the agency destroyed 90 videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, which resulted in a criminal investigation of government officials connected with the program. Many questions about his interrogation remain unanswered, but two legs of the three-legged stool are firmly in place.And as for water-boarding (which has been considered torture since Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition), the specific methods we used were adopted intact from the methods used by North Korea during the Korean war and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Those methods were not devised to elicit accurate information. They were designed to elicit false confessions … and basically just maximize sadistic pleasure without actually killing the victim. They were then used in SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) training for US servicemen to let them know the kind of thing our enemies might subject them to. Those SERE methods were then adopted by the CIA for … torture. They were not devised from experience or theory as methods designed to prove effective in eliciting reliable information. These techniques went from North Korean/Khmer Rouge > US military resistance training > adoption intact as US interrogation methods. We have become our enemy.First, they beat him. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.
And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to "produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic." Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.
Speaking of Zelikow, he is something of an expert on the law as it relates to torture and made an attempt to point out to members of the Bush administration that the legal logic of the torture memos was deeply flawed and shouldn’t be relied upon:
At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.[Rachel Maddow has a long interview with Zelikow: Part 1/Part 2.]
It is pretty clear that with torture, as with just about everything else, Bush, Cheney and those around them made aggressive efforts to ensure that no information that challenged their ideology and their actions ever saw the light of day.
As I said, torture is all about POWER. If you can torture someone under your power, you can do ANYTHING. Yes, including murder.
In June of last year, the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that over 100 detainees have died in US custody with up to 27 of them having been ruled to be homicides. Then there are the “disappeareds.” According to Human Rights Watch, 35 suspects known to have been held in secret prisons as far back as 2001 are still unaccounted for. The name of one of those missing prisoners, Hassan Ghul, was apparently accidentally included unredacted in one of the torture memos:
According to the memo, Ghul was one of 28 CIA detainees at the time who had been subjected to the agency’s "enhanced interrogation techniques." Specifically, the memo says he was subjected to "facial hold," "facial slap," "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," a technique called "walling," in which a detainee’s shoulders are repeatedly smashed against a wall, and the "attention grasp [8]," in which the detainee is placed in a choke-hold and slapped.Until this 2005 memo was released last week, the last time Ghul was heard from was 2004.
Thanks largely to Dick Cheney, who claimed last week that our torture was a “success,” the “torture debate” has now turned to the question of whether torture “works”.
Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post frames the issue correctly:
Yes, people break under torture and tell what they know, along with what they don't know and what they think their torturers want to hear. But there is no way to be certain that the valuable information wouldn't have been extracted through traditional -- and legal -- methods of interrogation. Even if experts have differing views about torture's effectiveness, there is one point on which they cannot disagree: It violates U.S. and international law.This is similar to President Obama’s response in his press conference yesterday:
[T]he public reports and the public justifications for these techniques, which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques, doesn't answer the core question. Which is, could we have gotten that same information without resorting to theseThere appears to be a break between the FBI and the CIA when it comes to the question of whether torture “works” – understandably, since the FBI refused to participate in torture while the CIA did. From the New York Times:
techniques? And it doesn't answer the broader question, are we safer as a consequence of having used these techniques?
In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, the F.B.I. director since 2001, Robert S.One FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, in a New York Times op-ed, writes about the successful efforts of the FBI and CIA in gaining “actionable intelligence” from Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002 using conventional interrogation methods (i.e., not torture). He disputes the claim that subsequent torture of Zubaydah produced anything of value:
Mueller III, was asked whether any attacks had been disrupted because of
intelligence obtained through the coercive methods. “I don’t believe that has been the case,” Mr. Mueller said. (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, John Miller, said on Tuesday, “The quote is accurate.”)
Defenders of these [torture] techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and [Jose] Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.Most of the specific claims of success using torture have similarly been refuted. It is worth taking the time to review this excellent timeline of some key events relevant to the “torture debate”. In addition to refuting claims of effectiveness for torture, the timeline also refutes some of the “ticking time bomb” justifications for torture – that in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 we didn’t know if another strike was imminent.
One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.
For example, the torture memos revealed that two prisoners, Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were waterboarded a total of 266 times. In the case of Zubaydah, that happened in August 2002 – almost a year after 9-11. In the case of KSM, it happened in March 2003 – a year and a half after 9-11. This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario always posited by torture advocates and fans of “24”. In the case of Zubaydah, as Soufan notes, we learned a lot of useful intelligence from him – in March through June of 2002 when the FBI interrogated him with conventional (i.e., non-torture) methods. The torture started thereafter.
Karl Rove and FOX News, among others, have claimed that torture prevented a “West Coast 9-11.” They claim that CIA waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave authorities information used to foil a plot to hijack an airplane with a shoe bomb and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles. But as Timothy Noah in Slate and Daily Kos TV have documented, the Rove timetable just doesn't add up. While KSM was arrested in March 2003, the Los Angeles plot was stopped in February 2002 -- more than a year earlier. Rove's tale is a blatant falsehood.
The New York Times had an article this week on how an ABC News interview in 2007 with a former CIA official skewed the “debate” over waterboarding:
In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.The Los Angeles Times had an article earlier this week on how the CIA avoided efforts to evaluate whether torture was actually effective in gaining actionable intelligence:
Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”
His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”
Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. “I think it was sanitized by the way it was described” in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group.
During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other
techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But
lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand
knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in
Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters
in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field. …
“It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”
The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects for nearly seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.The failure to conduct a comprehensive examination occurred despite calls to do so as early as 2003. That year, the agency's inspector general circulated drafts of a report that raised deep concerns about waterboarding and other methods, and recommended a study by outside experts on whether they worked. …As long as there is no definitive evaluation of the effectiveness of torture, you can claim anything, right?
But neither the inspector general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official -- not an interrogation expert -- was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts."Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques -- enhanced or
otherwise -- to see what resulted in the best information," said a senior U.S.
intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.
Matthew Alexander was a highly-successful former interrogator who led the team that obtained the intelligence resulting in the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (described in the book, “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq “). Writing in the Washington Post last November, Alexander also refuted the idea that torture is effective and describes part of the downside:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. … We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations --What is particularly shameful is that it is become increasingly clear (for example, from the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week) that much of the worst torture done in our name was undertaken because the Bush/Cheney administration was trying to come up with an Iraq-al Qaeda link to justify the Iraq war, not to protect us from some imminent threat. From a McClatchy article last week:
and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major reportThe Bush administration’s determination to make the world conform to their ideology and rationalizations is truly astounding.
tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to
prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them. … A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration. … "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies." Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said. A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
It has become increasingly apparent that most of the “detainees” seized in the “war on terror” were completely innocent. The vast majority were handed over by warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan in return for generous bounties. Some were bad guys, but some were just people the bounty recipient didn’t like – or, indeed, were handed over by a genuine bad guy to cover his own tracks. Since we didn’t capture the guys ourselves, and don’t speak the language or understand the culture, we were really pretty clueless as to the ultimate innocence or guilt of these people. As is typical with bureaucrats everywhere, our government officials didn’t want to admit their mistakes – especially if it would make them appear weak or, God forbid, someone who was released subsequently actually did something bad. The ultimate CYA – lock them up in a lawless black hole and try to forget about them.
As Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson, writes:
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either. The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation. This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get he bastards to the interrogators". It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway). The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released. But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces. … [Another unreported dimension of the debate] is the ad hoc intelligenceSo innocents were knowingly kept in detention to avoid having to admit mistakes and because they might have some information about something that, when combined with a lot of other stuff, might prove useful.
philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified. Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot. …
And these are the people Rumsfeld called, “the worst of the worst”.
Karl Rove recently said on FOX News (as shown in this great Daily Show clip): “All these techniques have now been ruined.”
This is my favorite argument against letting the American people know that their government has been torturing people. Rove nails it. Now our enemies will know we might torture them so they can train themselves to resist – as a result, the “techniques have now been ruined”. How, exactly, does one “train” to resist ELEVEN DAYS of sleep deprivation brought about through excruciatingly painful “stress positions”? And waterboarding has been a well-known favorite of sadists through the centuries and apparently that hasn’t diminished it continuing popularity. But put that aside. What I like is the premise of Rove’s objection – that we want our government to continue torturing people. Rove, and others like him, have actually stated the best reason FOR a full, public investigation of these torture practices – TO MAKE SURE THIS STUFF NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.
Personally, I think trying to prosecute people for this stuff would be counterproductive. As soon as a special prosecutor was named and a grand jury empanelled, all further releases of information would probably come to a halt because “it is the subject of a criminal investigation.” And I think it would be very hard to secure a conviction given the legal cover provided by the torture memos. It would be Hellish partisan warfare. Better to create an independent Truth Commission that has the power to grant immunity in return for testimony, as was done in South Africa. With immunity, no one can invoke his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. And if they lie or hide evidence (as Cheney’s office did in the Valerie Plame affair), they can be prosecuted for perjury or obstruction of justice (as Scooter Libby was). So EVERYTHING comes out. Let’s put Cheney to the test. If he claims that “torture works,” let’s find out. Get all the facts on the table. At least we can ensure that a truthful historical record is created and that the perpetrators live with their public infamy. And it might help ensure that this type of thing never happens again – at least not in this country.
(I do feel strongly, however, that Jay Bybee, now a Ninth Circuit Appeals Court judge, should be impeached. A war criminal should not hold a lifetime appointment to the second highest court in the land.)
I find it incredible that people who don’t trust the government to deliver the mail would be willing to give the government the power to torture people. In secret, of course. It must be kept secret. Because letting “the enemy” know our methods would “ruin” them.
Do we really want to give any government that power? Including our government?
Trust us. Trust BIG GOVERNMENT. We wouldn’t abuse our secret powers. Just trust us.
The fact that one of our two major political parties is almost unanimously supporting torture is staggering. History will not view this positively
Good thing these people are out of power.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
bank illusions
You may have noticed that the big banks have been reporting upbeat “earnings” figures in recent days. Just yesterday, Bank of America reported a staggering $4.2 billion in first quarter "earnings." But it’s share price declined by an also staggering 24% What’s up? Surely investors saw the impressive "earnings" numbers. Of course they did. Which is why Bank of America’s share price went down. Those “earnings” are just more of the financial gimmickry that got us into this financial crisis. Bank of America’s deposit base (excluding acquisitions) actually declined and defaults on every kind of loan increased sharply. Its credit card division lost $1.8 billion; it’s mortgage division lost $500 million. But it resorted to every trick in the book to manufacture “earnings.”
Can anyone explain to me why Ken Lewis is still chairman and CEO of Bank of America?
As Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in today’s New York Times (“Bank Profits Appear Out of Thin Air”):
Goldman Sachs even made an entire month disappear. In the course of changing its fiscal year, Goldman left behind an “orphaned” December 2008 which just happened to include $1.5 billion in losses. (As the Church Lady would say, “How convenient.”) Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase all booked gains from the decline in the value of their bonds. (Funny how that works – the banks’ debtors think their odds of defaulting have increased and that results in an increase in paper profits for the banks.)
This is all part of a campaign on the part of the big banks to convince the world that they really are solvent and that they can survive without government funds (while they hope that a recovering economy eventually bails them out).
Some bank CEOs have been whining lately about having been “forced” by Bush’s Treasury secretary – former Goldman Sachs CEO Paulson – to take TARP funds (i.e., equity infusions) from the Federal government last fall as the global financial system was melting down. They didn’t express their concerns back then when their survival was at stake. Rather, it was subsequent threats to their seven and eight figure bonuses (and government success in stabilizing the financial system) that prompted this new distain for government help.
(To some Republicans in Congress, and assorted teabagging wingnuts around the country, it has somehow become Obama who “forced” the banks to take bailout funds and any actual or proposed restraints on banks that have received tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer aid is evidence of his “socialism” or even “fascism”.)
Of course, if the bank CEOs were more concerned about their shareholders than about restrictions on their compensation, they would presumably want to maintain strong balance sheets for the (still real) possibility of worse times ahead. But they have never shown any particular concern for the long-term interests of their shareholders.
Lately, Goldman has been leading a PR campaign intended to allow them to get out from under TARP restrictions. Recall, Goldman received extraordinary permission to convert from a relatively-unregulated investment bank to a heavily-regulated bank holding company precisely so that they could avail themselves of the federal bailout. (It’s a nice trick – enjoy the benefits of being an investment bank when times are flush and there is huge money to be made, and then convert to being a commercial bank holding company when the whole system melts down. Sort of like being allowed to buy a fire insurance policy after your house is in flames.) They have even raised $5 billion as evidence that they no longer need the federal funds. But that would actually seem to be evidence that they needed the federal funds. As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, “If banks now claim they want to return the money because they don’t need it, why do they have to raise new capital to replace the money from we the people in order to repay the government?”
Goldman received “only” $10 billion in TARP funds. But they also received $13 billion in payments from the AIG bailout, which they are not proposing to pay back. (Goldman claims that they were fully hedged against their losses as an AIG counterparty and that, therefore, they didn’t need AIG bailout funds. Which, of course, raises the question as to why they received those funds – which the public was led to believe were required to avoid the “systemic risk” of losses to counterparties. If Goldman was fully hedged against losses from AIG, then presumably there was no systemic risk to justify those payments. It also raises the question whether Goldman hedged in a manner that resulted in them being paid twice for the same exposure to AIG. No one is saying – certainly not Goldman. Alan Abelson in Barron’s raises the possibility that those AIG funds may account for part of Goldman’s recent “earnings.” There has been absolutely no transparency on these issues, so we really don’t know. But that is the subject for a separate post.)
The Goldman bailout doesn’t stop just with the TARP funds and the AIG counterparty payments. As the New York Times noted in a good piece last week, the ability of Goldman and other banks to access the credit markets is a result of their ability to tap into the AAA credit rating of the federal government. Goldman alone has issued over $28 billion in FDIC-backed bonds. Needless to say, they aren’t proposing to pay off those bonds and let the taxpayers off the hook for their guarantee.
From the New York Times piece:
I am picking on Goldman here because they have taken the lead in elevating these issues and seemed the most determined to get out from under the TARP restrictions. (And because it was their own former CEO, Paulson, who gave them the money in the first place. And it was another Goldman guy, Neel Kashkari who has been administering the TARP program.) But the same points apply to other banks. The irresponsibility of these banks has cost taxpayers and the Fed trillions of dollars in equity infusions, loans and guarantees. According to Bloomberg all these forms of assistance now total almost $13 TRILLION – almost equal to annual US GDP.
The truly amazing thing is that the banks haven’t been able to generate REAL earnings despite a $13 trillion bailout. From the Sorkin piece:
(Remind me again why Ken Lewis is still running Bank of America?)
We can’t let these banks off the hook as soon as the immediate crisis shows signs of stabilizing somewhat. The federal government continues to be lax on the banks. Metaphorically speaking, the federal government should keep its foot on their throats until we have put in place a new regulatory regime that ensures the crisis isn’t repeated a few years down the road. We can’t return to a world where the financial sector sucks up 40% of all the earnings in the economy through essentially infinite leverage while creating little of actual value for the economy. This is just casino capitalism where the gains are privitized and the losses are socialized (leaving us with the worst of both systems).
Can anyone explain to me why Ken Lewis is still chairman and CEO of Bank of America?
As Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in today’s New York Times (“Bank Profits Appear Out of Thin Air”):
This is starting to feel like amateur hour for aspiring magicians. Another day, another attempt by a Wall Street bank to pull a bunny out of the hat, showing off an earnings report that it hopes will elicit oohs and aahs from the market. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and, on Monday, Bank of America all tried to wow their audiences with what appeared to be — presto! — better-than-expected numbers. But in each case, investors spotted the attempts at sleight of hand, and didn’t buy it for a second.
Goldman Sachs even made an entire month disappear. In the course of changing its fiscal year, Goldman left behind an “orphaned” December 2008 which just happened to include $1.5 billion in losses. (As the Church Lady would say, “How convenient.”) Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase all booked gains from the decline in the value of their bonds. (Funny how that works – the banks’ debtors think their odds of defaulting have increased and that results in an increase in paper profits for the banks.)
This is all part of a campaign on the part of the big banks to convince the world that they really are solvent and that they can survive without government funds (while they hope that a recovering economy eventually bails them out).
Some bank CEOs have been whining lately about having been “forced” by Bush’s Treasury secretary – former Goldman Sachs CEO Paulson – to take TARP funds (i.e., equity infusions) from the Federal government last fall as the global financial system was melting down. They didn’t express their concerns back then when their survival was at stake. Rather, it was subsequent threats to their seven and eight figure bonuses (and government success in stabilizing the financial system) that prompted this new distain for government help.
(To some Republicans in Congress, and assorted teabagging wingnuts around the country, it has somehow become Obama who “forced” the banks to take bailout funds and any actual or proposed restraints on banks that have received tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer aid is evidence of his “socialism” or even “fascism”.)
Of course, if the bank CEOs were more concerned about their shareholders than about restrictions on their compensation, they would presumably want to maintain strong balance sheets for the (still real) possibility of worse times ahead. But they have never shown any particular concern for the long-term interests of their shareholders.
Lately, Goldman has been leading a PR campaign intended to allow them to get out from under TARP restrictions. Recall, Goldman received extraordinary permission to convert from a relatively-unregulated investment bank to a heavily-regulated bank holding company precisely so that they could avail themselves of the federal bailout. (It’s a nice trick – enjoy the benefits of being an investment bank when times are flush and there is huge money to be made, and then convert to being a commercial bank holding company when the whole system melts down. Sort of like being allowed to buy a fire insurance policy after your house is in flames.) They have even raised $5 billion as evidence that they no longer need the federal funds. But that would actually seem to be evidence that they needed the federal funds. As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, “If banks now claim they want to return the money because they don’t need it, why do they have to raise new capital to replace the money from we the people in order to repay the government?”
Goldman received “only” $10 billion in TARP funds. But they also received $13 billion in payments from the AIG bailout, which they are not proposing to pay back. (Goldman claims that they were fully hedged against their losses as an AIG counterparty and that, therefore, they didn’t need AIG bailout funds. Which, of course, raises the question as to why they received those funds – which the public was led to believe were required to avoid the “systemic risk” of losses to counterparties. If Goldman was fully hedged against losses from AIG, then presumably there was no systemic risk to justify those payments. It also raises the question whether Goldman hedged in a manner that resulted in them being paid twice for the same exposure to AIG. No one is saying – certainly not Goldman. Alan Abelson in Barron’s raises the possibility that those AIG funds may account for part of Goldman’s recent “earnings.” There has been absolutely no transparency on these issues, so we really don’t know. But that is the subject for a separate post.)
The Goldman bailout doesn’t stop just with the TARP funds and the AIG counterparty payments. As the New York Times noted in a good piece last week, the ability of Goldman and other banks to access the credit markets is a result of their ability to tap into the AAA credit rating of the federal government. Goldman alone has issued over $28 billion in FDIC-backed bonds. Needless to say, they aren’t proposing to pay off those bonds and let the taxpayers off the hook for their guarantee.
From the New York Times piece:
Eager to escape the long arm of government, Goldman Sachs is preparing to return $10 billion in taxpayer funds as fast as the ink can dry on the check. But the bank, and a number of others, is quietly holding on to other forms of public support that come with virtually no strings attached.
Banks have been benefiting from an indirect subsidy adopted by the federal government at the height of the financial crisis last fall that allows them to issue their debt cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
That debt — more than $300 billion for the banking industry so far — helped otherwise cash-strained banks to keep their businesses running even when it was virtually impossible for other companies to raise funds. The program will continue to bolster scores of banks through at least the middle of 2012.
The value of the assistance, economists say, is incalculable, because it helped keep participating banks alive despite the panic sown in financial markets after Lehman Brothers collapsed.
“I don’t know how you measure that subsidy,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist
at Moody’s Economy.com. “That’s why they say it’s invaluable. It’s an infinite subsidy. It’s their franchise value.”
The program has allowed Goldman to issue $28 billion in debt over the last six months. The debt totals more than $40 billion each for Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, and $23 billion for Morgan Stanley.
The F.D.I.C. program does not come with the compensation and other regulatory conditions attached by Congress to the $700 billion bailout, but it charges the banks a small fee. Rather than relying on a direct infusion of taxpayer money, the agency is helping the banks raise debt from private investors by endowing them with the equivalent of an AAA rating. If any of the banks relying on the guarantees ran into trouble, the F.D.I.C. would make good on those bonds. …
Goldman was the first bank to take advantage of the debt program when it was introduced in November, when the financial crisis made it nearly impossible for companies to raise cash. Morgan Stanley and Citigroup were quick to follow. More than 119 debt deals have been issued with the F.D.I.C.’s backing, according to Dealogic. Larger banks are using the program more than smaller ones, because they have capital markets businesses that depend on financing in the public markets.
Bank executives are quick to acknowledge that the program was critical to their survival.
“We would have had a real problem in the capital markets,” said David A. Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman. “The market shut down.”
I am picking on Goldman here because they have taken the lead in elevating these issues and seemed the most determined to get out from under the TARP restrictions. (And because it was their own former CEO, Paulson, who gave them the money in the first place. And it was another Goldman guy, Neel Kashkari who has been administering the TARP program.) But the same points apply to other banks. The irresponsibility of these banks has cost taxpayers and the Fed trillions of dollars in equity infusions, loans and guarantees. According to Bloomberg all these forms of assistance now total almost $13 TRILLION – almost equal to annual US GDP.
The truly amazing thing is that the banks haven’t been able to generate REAL earnings despite a $13 trillion bailout. From the Sorkin piece:
What’s particularly puzzling is why the banks don’t just try to make some money the old-fashioned way. After all, earning it, if you could call it that, has never been easier with a business model sponsored by the federal government. That’s the one in which Uncle Sam and we taxpayers are offering the banks dirt-cheap money, which they can turn around and lend at much higher rates. “If the federal government let me borrow money at zero percent interest, and then lend it out at 4 to 12 percent interest, even I could make a profit,” said Professor Finkelstein of the Tuck School. “And if a college professor can make money in banking in 2009, what should we expect from the highly paid C.E.O.’s that populate corner offices?”
(Remind me again why Ken Lewis is still running Bank of America?)
We can’t let these banks off the hook as soon as the immediate crisis shows signs of stabilizing somewhat. The federal government continues to be lax on the banks. Metaphorically speaking, the federal government should keep its foot on their throats until we have put in place a new regulatory regime that ensures the crisis isn’t repeated a few years down the road. We can’t return to a world where the financial sector sucks up 40% of all the earnings in the economy through essentially infinite leverage while creating little of actual value for the economy. This is just casino capitalism where the gains are privitized and the losses are socialized (leaving us with the worst of both systems).
Thursday, March 26, 2009
great day
Yesterday brought great news from Congress – the best in a long time when it comes to the environment. The “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009,” passed with strong bipartisan support, designates 86 new Wild and Scenic Rivers and protects over two million acres of public land with new Wilderness designations.
I’m on the national board of both American Rivers and Earthjustice, and both organizations played critical roles in the protection of the wild places covered by this legislation and in its ultimate passage.
From yesterday’s American Rivers press release:
Washington, DC -- The second largest Wild and Scenic Rivers package in history now heads to President Obama’s desk, after passing the House of Representatives today by a vote of 285-140. The bipartisan H.R. 146, the legislative vehicle for the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, will safeguard over 1,100 miles of rivers in Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, California, and Massachusetts. The legislation includes important protections for 350,000 acres of land along 86 new Wild and Scenic Rivers and it also contains new Wilderness designations for over two million acres of public land. Last week the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 77-20. “Passage of this bill is an expression of the home grown support for one of the largest environmental protection measures in decades,” said Rebecca Wodder, President of American Rivers. “Today congressional leaders established a legacy of clean water, outdoor recreation and the economic benefits of healthy rivers and wild places for our grandchildren.” American Rivers is extremely grateful to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Chairman Jeff Bingaman, Chairman Nick Rahall, and all the sponsors of the Wild and Scenic Rivers provisions. Without their determination to see this legislation through we could not have protected these national treasures for future generations of Americans. A Wild and Scenic River designation protects riverside land along both sides of a river corridor, blocks dams and other harmful water projects, and preserves a river's free-flowing nature. It helps protect and improve clean water, as well as the river's unique historic, cultural, scenic, ecological, and recreational values. The law was enacted in 1968 and three years ago American Rivers set the goal of designating 40 new Wild and Scenic Rivers by the 40th anniversary of the law. With passage of this package we more than double our goal by designating 86 new Wild and Scenic Rivers. “From the Snake River headwaters in Wyoming to the desert Southwest’s Fossil Creek, to the trout streams of the Rockies, and the popular fishing and paddling streams of the Pacific Northwest, local people—hikers, boaters, hunters and anglers—pushed for these historic protections,” said Wodder. “These rivers are the lifeblood of the land and our communities and the Wild and Scenic River designations are a tremendous gift to future generations.”Read the press release for a full listing of the protected areas.
American Rivers was founded in 1973 with the specific mission of increasing the number of rivers protected by the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. (Over the years our mission has broadened substantially to address a wide variety of issues affecting people and rivers.) As noted in the press release, last year marked the 40th anniversary of passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and to commemorate that anniversary, we undertook a “40x40” campaign to secure 40 new Wild and Scenic Rivers designations. We missed our self-imposed 2008 deadline by three months, but we more than doubled the number of designations. It was worth the extra time.
To give you an idea of some of what is being protected, check out the Snake River headwaters:
My personal favorite among the new designations is the Owyhee River – spectacular canyon lands along the Idaho/Oregon border.
Earthjustice (which started out as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) is the premier non-profit environmental law firm in the country. Among the newly designated Wilderness areas is Mineral King, which has particular historical significance to Earthjustice. From yesterday’s press release:
Mineral King -- the Sierra "birthplace" of Earthjustice and of environmental law -- is one of many wild places across the nation that were granted wilderness status on March 25 by Congress, freeing them from the threat of degradation by development. After years of work and a recent false start, the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009 passed through the House of Representatives. It already passed the Senate, and is expected to be signed into law by President Obama. The new designation will permanently protect more than 2 million acres of America's wilderness in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. Two expanses of wild lands protected by the legislation, including Mineral King andThe bill also protects 1.2 million acres in the Wyoming Range, the largest tract of roadless land in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The Bush-Cheney administration wanted to open it up to massive oil and gas development, which Earthjustice helped to stop. (Hunting, fishing, recreation, and associated travel – sustainable use of the land – will bring in more money to the state than the oil and gas development.) Earthjustice also helped the legislation over the final humps in the face of much last minute maneuvering by opponents.
the Wyoming Range, are still in their natural state because of vigorous past efforts by Earthjustice attorneys. Of those, Mineral King has special significance for Earthjustice. Tucked away in the Southern Sierra, Mineral King Valley is a subalpine jewel that attracted the attention of Walt Disney Corporation in the 1960's. Disney had visions of building a world-class ski resort in Mineral King to rival Sun Valley in size and provide recreational opportunities to people living in Southern California. The Sierra Club was less than enthusiastic. Mineral King was surrounded on three sides by Sequoia National Park, and would have been included in the park save for some abandoned mine shafts left by miners when the ore played out two decades before the park was created. … The club appealed to the Forest Service and the Park Service to deny the resort its permits, to no avail. The only recourse left was federal court. This was a near novelty -- most courts required potential plaintiffs to demonstrate a financial interest in a matter they wished to ask the court to rule on. But the club insisted that the interest of its members in the recreational possibilities offered by Mineral King, plus its general mission of protecting places like Mineral King, should allow it to bring a lawsuit and ask for relief. Judge William Sweigert, of the district court in San Francisco, agreed and blocked the project. The government appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and that court ruled that the Sierra Club had no right to bring the case -- it lacked "standing to sue." The club then appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court ruled against the club but, in a famous footnote, said the club was free to return to the district court and refile the case with an extensive explanation of how the interests of itself and its members would be harmed by the resort. The club did so, and Judge Sweigert reimposed the injunction. Disney, tiring of the bad publicity the case had generated, walked away. A few years later Mineral King was added to Sequoia National Park. Now, with its addition to the National Wilderness Protection System, Mineral King will be protected in perpetuity.
Yesterday was a great day for future generations of Americans (and other species). If that makes you happy, maybe give some props to American Rivers and Earthjustice (these are tough times for non-profits – which I guess would include just about all of us these days).
[For those of you in Seattle, American Rivers is having its annual Northwest dinner and auction on April 23rd at a very cool venue, Herban Feast at Sodo Park. It’s $125/head. It is always a fun event. This year it will feature climate expert Dr. Lara Hansen. American Rivers president Rebecca Wodder will also be joining us. If you are interested, contact me for more details.]
Sunday, March 22, 2009
fox news destroys world economy
Sixty days into the Obama presidency, Republicans are pronouncing Obama responsible for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression based on the fact that stock prices have declined since he took office. In fact, the S&P 500 has declined 8.6% since Obama’s inauguration. As you would expect, FOX News has been leading the charge (“Study: Dow's Decline Is Fastest for a New President in Nearly a Century”)
But, wait. The stock market didn’t peak on January 20, 2009. It peaked on October 9, 2007 – more than seventeen months ago – and has declined by over 50% since then. So, what happened in October 2007?
On October 14, 2007, FOX Financial News went on the air. The previous close on the S&P 500 was 1561 – only four points below its record high. As you can see, 99.5% of the decline in the stock market can be attributed to FOX Financial News.
We report, you decide.
But, wait. The stock market didn’t peak on January 20, 2009. It peaked on October 9, 2007 – more than seventeen months ago – and has declined by over 50% since then. So, what happened in October 2007?
On October 14, 2007, FOX Financial News went on the air. The previous close on the S&P 500 was 1561 – only four points below its record high. As you can see, 99.5% of the decline in the stock market can be attributed to FOX Financial News.
We report, you decide.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
who is john galtsson?
Michael Lewis is probably the most entertaining financial writer in this country. He writes about other stuff, too. But he made his name with "Liars Poker" and he still has a way of capturing the culture of the financial world better than almost anyone. He appears to be writing a book about the current financial crisis, giving us the periodic pleasure of it as a work-in-progress in various publications. His latest is in Vanity Fair ("Wall Street on the Tundra"), about the Icelandic Meltdown. Just the bit where he describes how the 1100-year-old Icelandic fishing culture naturally lent itself to investment banking is a classic. Read it now.
This is the gist:
He comes up with passages like this:
And in part of the final passage of the article:
There are passages that made me think of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's as if that island nation of 300,000 inhabitants had awkwardly morphed into John Galt's exclusive commune -- where everyone is a hedge-fund manager.
Along the lines of this recent updated version of Atlas Shrugged. A sample of the faux Ms. Rand's timeless prose:
This is the gist:
Iceland was ... a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”
An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”
He comes up with passages like this:
Back in the 1980s, Oddsson had fallen under the spell of Milton Friedman, the brilliant economist who was able to persuade even those who spent their lives working for the government that government was a waste of life. So Oddsson went on a quest to give Icelandic people their freedom—by which he meant freedom from government controls of any sort. As prime minister he lowered taxes, privatized industry, freed up trade, and, finally, in 2002, privatized the banks. At length, weary of prime-ministering, he got himself appointed governor of the Central Bank—even though he was a poet without bankingAnd this:
experience.
Fishermen, in other words, are a lot like American investment bankers. Their overconfidence leads them to impoverish not just themselves but also their fishing grounds.
And in part of the final passage of the article:
When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicon version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.
There are passages that made me think of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's as if that island nation of 300,000 inhabitants had awkwardly morphed into John Galt's exclusive commune -- where everyone is a hedge-fund manager.
Along the lines of this recent updated version of Atlas Shrugged. A sample of the faux Ms. Rand's timeless prose:
"I heard the thugs in Washington were trying to take your Rearden metal at the point of a gun," she said. "Don't let them, Hank. With your advanced alloy and my high-tech railroad, we'll revitalize our country's failing infrastructure and make big, virtuous profits."
"Oh, no, I got out of that suckers' game. I now run my own hedge-fund firm, Rearden Capital Management."
"What?"
He stood and adjusted his suit jacket so that his body didn't betray his shameful weakness. He walked toward her and sat informally on the edge of her desk. "Why make a product when you can make dollars? Right this second, I'm earning millions in interest off money I don't even have."
He gestured to his floor-to-ceiling windows, a symbol of his productive ability and
goodness.
"There's a whole world out there of byzantine financial products just waiting to be invented, Dagny. Let the leeches run my factories into the ground! I hope they do! I've taken out more insurance on a single Rearden Steel bond than the entire company is even worth! When my old company finally tanks, I'll make a cool $877 million."
Saturday, March 7, 2009
just making stuff up
With the announcement yesterday that the US economy lost another 651,000 jobs in February, and an upward revision in the job loss estimates for recent months, the current economic downturn is unquestionably the worst since the Great Depression. The economy has lost 4.4 million jobs since December 2007, but more alarming is that 2.6 million jobs have been lost in just the past four months. Unemployment tends to be a lagging indicator, so clearly there is worse to come. Look at the chart below – there is no indication that we are anywhere near bottoming out. We’re still in free-fall.
(During the recession of the early ‘80’s unemployment peaked at a higher rate than the current rate. But it started from a higher base, so the job loss was less. And since then revisions to the way unemployment is measured have the effect of understating unemployment. The broadest measure of unemployment, including those who have given up looking for work or who are involuntarily working part time, is now almost 15%.)
[click to enlarge]So what is the Republican response to this worst global economic crisis in our lifetime?
“House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, reacted to the rise in unemployment today by calling for a federal government spending freeze.”You can’t make this stuff up.
And don’t forget the “bold” GOP plan for turning around the economy: elimination of the capital gains tax. (Actually, there is nothing new about this proposal. Newt Gringrich was pushing it as far back as 1997 – when the economy was booming. Boom or bust, deficits or surpluses, war or peace, inflation or deflation, the Republicans have a one-size-fits-all solution: Tax cuts for the rich and reduce the social safety net.)
I don’t know about you, but the capital gains tax is pretty much the least of my worries these days.
Josh Marshall’s summarizes the point:
Let's just stipulate DC Republicans are simply not part of the discussion when it comes to repairing the US economy or arresting our slide into deep economic misery. And any reporters who aren't clear about this are just lying to their readers or viewers. The latest Republican plan, in the face of today's new spike in unemployment, is a freeze on federal spending. I'm not even sure it's fair to say that this is a replay of the disastrous decisions the magnified the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933. It's more a parody of it. When the crisis is a rapid and catastrophic drop off in demand, you handcuff the one force that can create demand (i.e., the federal government) in the throes of the contraction. That's insane. Levels of stimulus are a decent question. Intensifying the contraction is just insane and frankly a joke. It's time to recognize that the only debate here is happening among Democrats and sundry non-affiliated sane people. The leaders of the GOP are simply not part of the conversation.
Republicans seem to be occupying some kind of alternative reality. The main Republican tactic these days is to mock every form of government spending to undermine confidence in President Obama’s economic recovery plans and foment opposition to them. It shouldn’t be too hard to find instances of wasteful spending – that’s the oldest populist trick in the book. But increasingly, they are just making stuff up.
Take Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress last week. His big example of wasteful spending in the president’s stimulus bill was, “$8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland.” The whole right-wing noise machine has been shouting out this mythical Las Vegas-to-Disneyland train in recent days – originally as part of the stimulus bill but lately it has morphed into an element of the fiscal 2008 omnibus spending bill. As “reported” by FOX News’s Megyn Kelly (in the latter context):
It's a super railroad, of sorts -- a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects?
“We kid you not,” says FOX News. (Is it worth pointing out that the Bunny Ranch is outside Carson City, 400 miles north of Las Vegas? Not that I know these kinds of things.)
Pure fiction. Yes, the stimulus bill included $8 billion for high-speed rail lines. But that allocation of funds does not include any “earmarks” and it doesn’t specify any such Las Vegas-to-Disneyland rail line. The funds are to be allocated by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican it is worth noting. While no specific projects have been designated, the Department of Transportation does have a map of proposed high-speed rail corridors:
[click to enlarge]Notice there is no line to Las Vegas (let alone the Bunny Ranch).
And what’s wrong with high-speed rail lines? This is exactly the kind of infrastructure project that has propelled economic growth throughout American history. Canals. The transcontinental railroad. Rural electrification. Western water projects. The interstate highway system. The Internet. To name a few. This is exactly the kind of thing the government should be doing, especially at a time when aggregate demand has collapsed and unemployment is skyrocketing (and we want to break our addiction to fossil fuels). And this is hardly cutting-edge technology. Japan built the world’s first “bullet trains” that could go 130 mph in the early ‘60’s. (I lived in Japan in the early/mid ‘80’s and loved traveling the country on the “Shinkansen” – much better than air travel.) Heck, even Spain now has a train that goes over 200 mph – and they are planning over 6000 miles of high-speed track (video). But to Republicans this is a subject of mockery and derision. (A funny story here.)
The other big target of Republican anti-spending wrath has been $30 million for “Nancy Pelosi’s marsh mouse.” You must have heard about the little rodents by now. They were the primary Republican objection to Obama’s economic recovery plan before the mythical Bunny Ranch train. Supposedly there is some outrageous amount (it varies in the telling – usually $30 million, but sometimes more) in the Obama plan for the protection of marsh mice in Nancy Pelosi’s district. (As I was drafting this post I began to include some of these expressions of Republican rodent rage. But when I got up to over 20 such quotes I decided to cut them all out. But you can read some of them here and here.)
Again, pure fiction. Turns out, the stimulus bill has some funds for wetlands restoration. (I’m on the national board of American Rivers and wetlands restoration is a priority of ours. It is a good use of stimulus money. Labor intensive with all kinds of long-term benefits. A GOOD thing.) Among the “shovel-ready projects” submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are marshland restoration projects proposed by the California State Coastal Conservancy, a state agency charged with preserving and restoring the coastline. These projects have all sorts of benefits like flood and storm water runoff control, habitat restoration, and clean water improvements. But Nancy Pelosi lives in California and the salt marsh harvest mouse is one of many species that live in the kinds of wetlands that might benefit from restoration, so in the Republican alternative reality this became spending for Nancy Pelosi’s mouse. Never mind that these projects have nothing to do with the marsh mouse per se. And that the Army Corps and NOAA have not even indicated that they would fund any of the projects that the California State Coastal Conservancy has proposed. And that there aren’t even any proposed wetland restoration projects in Nancy Pelosi’s district and she had nothing to do with this wetlands restoration provision. Not only is the story false, it’s stupid. Do Republicans really think this kind of thing is what the American people care about during a global economic crisis when millions of people are losing their jobs?
Earlier, Republicans were claiming that the stimulus bill provided $5 billion as a “political payoff” for ACORN (a group whose voter-registration work has resulted in it being demonized by the right). Republican critics included House minority leader Boehner and Sen. “Diaper Dave” Vitter (R-La.) (perhaps best know as a client of the DC madam with a diaper fetish). Turns out, the funding is for housing and community development programs signed into law by Gerald Ford for which ACORN (along with just about anyone else in America) theoretically could apply – but ACORN hasn’t and has said it has no intention of doing so. As Factcheck.org reports:
Boehner and Vitter commit two logical fallacies. Their argument has the form:Another attack line is the billions of dollars for “remodeled federal offices”. New drapes and designer wastepaper baskets, presumably. From Newsweek:1. The stimulus bill provides funding for redeveloping neighborhoods.
That's an example of what philosophers call the undistributed middle fallacy. It's a common mistake … [b]ut Boehner and Vitter compound their error by treating different terms as if they had the same meaning. ACORN does indeed work in redeveloping neighborhoods, but the work that it does is not the same sort of work for which NSP provides funding. By pretending as if the two are the same, Boehner and Vitter commit the fallacy of equivocation. We're accustomed to seeing logical fallacies in political arguments. But working two of them into a single argument is unusually bad logic.
2. ACORN does work in redeveloping neighborhoods.
3. Therefore the stimulus bill provides funding for ACORN.
According to GSA's acting administrator, Paul F. Prouty, this will allow the agency to comply with laws requiring it to reduce energy and fossil fuel consumption. Plans for making the buildings more environmentally friendly include thicker insulation, more efficient windows, dual flush toilets and LED lighting in parking garages – small changes, but GSA owns about 1,500 properties that would need to be updated. They also have bigger plans, such as installing energy-producing roofs and intelligent lighting systems.
Increasing the energy-efficiency of federal buildings sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Then there is the infamous $300 million for “golf carts.” Turns out, the funding is for government purchases of (in the language of the stimulus bill), “motor vehicles with higher fuel economy, including: hybrid vehicles; neighborhood electric vehicles; electric vehicles; and commercially-available, plug-in hybrid vehicles.” High-fuel-economy cars = golf carts. The horror!
And who could forget $200,000 for “tattoo removal” (actually part of an effective anti-crime effort that helps get youth out of gangs).
Don’t even get me started on the $1.7 million for "swine odor and manure management research" (turns out people subjected to a lot of pig emissions come down with a pretty nasty set of symptoms – the kind of thing that you might want to look into a bit – maybe to the tune of $1.7 million).
I could go on all day refuting Republican lines of attack – but it’s a Sisyphean task. They just make this stuff up, so there is literally an infinite supply of fiscal outrages.
This whole thing about “earmarks” has become ridiculous. First, to be clear, the Obama economic recovery program had NO earmarks. Then there is the $410 billion omnibus spending bill for the remaining six and a half months of fiscal 2009 that has spent eight months working its way through Congress. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, it has in it $7.7 billion in “earmarks.” That is in addition to a slightly lower amount for fiscal 2009 spending to date.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with “earmarks” per se. An “earmark” just consists of Congress directing spending toward a specific program or project. The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse. If Congress didn’t direct the spending, some executive-branch agency would. Even if, as a general matter, the executive branch might do a better job of it, that isn’t inherently so. Congress not only has every right to direct spending, but it is actually the branch of government with the explicit Constitutional control over spending (and more direct accountability to votes – which, of course, is the problem). Sure, it is a power subject to abuse (as the Jack Abramoff scandal demonstrated). And unquestionably many “earmarks” are dumb and wasteful. Earmarks increased four-fold under Republican control of Congress. But now (thanks to Democrats, since they took control of Congress) earmarks are transparent – each one has to be specifically identified to the particular member of Congress who proposed it (in many cases more a matter of pride than shame). According to Taxpayers for Common Sense there were $14 billion in “earmarks” (including the current omnibus bill) in the 2009 budget – down from 2008. So that is less than ½ of one percent of the $3.1 trillion budget. Even if that spending is 100% wasteful – and there is no reason to believe it is – that is a pretty trivial amount of “waste.”
Speaking of Taxpayers for Common Sense, they have compiled a database of earmarks in the current budget. The top “porkmeisters”? Six out of the top ten are Republicans: Earmarks (number/$ in millions) 1. Cochran (R-MS): 204 $471m
2. Wicker (R-MS): 143 $390m
3. Landrieu (D-LA): 177 $332m
4. Harkin (D-IA): 177 $292m
5. Vitter (R-LA): 142 $249m
6. Bond (R-MO): 86 $248m
7. Feinstein (D-CA): 153 $235m
8. Inouye (D-HI): 106 $225m
9. Shelby (R-AL): 125 $219m
10. Grassley (R-IA): 125 $219m
But this is really a silly political distraction. We’re talking about ½ of one percent of the federal budget at a time of global economic crisis. What about, you know, ECONOMIC POLICY? And there we have a Republican “plan” consisting of a federal spending freeze and the elimination of the capital gains tax.
Gail Collins had a great piece in the New York Times after Bobby Jindal’s infamous Republican response that touches on this subject:
Absent any deep thoughts, the Republicans are going to complain about waste. The high point of Jindal’s address came when he laced into “wasteful spending” in the stimulus bill, and used as an example a $140 million appropriation for keeping an eye on the volcanoes in places like Alaska, where one is currently rumbling. “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.,” Jindal claimed. I don’t know about you, but my reaction was: Wow, what a great stimulus plan. The most wasteful thing in it is volcano monitoring. Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours. O.K., I’m done. The Republicans can’t try to convince the country their ideas are better because of that intellectual bankruptcy problem. All they can do is make Barack Obama’s programs look feckless, plunging everyone into so much despair that by next summer the public will be ready to go live in caves and eat squirrel stew.Oh, by the way, volcano monitoring is a pretty good thing. You’d think the governor of Louisiana would appreciate the idea of anticipating natural disasters. But, alas, he is a Republican.
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