From The Washington Post -- November 23, 2010:
Attack on Michelle Obama shows Palin's Ignorance of History
By Richard Cohen
When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation's capital. I have only vague memories of that trip - the heat, the expanse of the White House's grounds, the Jefferson Memorial. I do remember we took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet) and it was there that I saw my first sign with the word "colored" on it - a rooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States was an apartheid nation.
It is Sarah Palin who brings back these memories. In her new book, she reportedly takes Michelle Obama to task for her supposedly infamous remark from the 2008 campaign: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Instantly, Republicans pounced. Among the first to do so was Cindy McCain, who said, "I have and always will be proud of my country." It was a cheap shot, but her husband's selection of Palin for the ticket and plenty of cheap shots from Palin ("death panels," etc.) were yet to come.
Michelle Obama quickly explained herself. She was proud of the turnout in the primaries - so many young people, etc. Evan Thomas, writing perceptively in Newsweek, thought - as I did - that she was saying something else. He dug into her senior thesis at Princeton - "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" - to find a young woman who felt, or was made to feel, "more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before." This was not a statement of racism. This was a statement of fact.
It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact - indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's case, her ancestors were slaves - Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the back of the bus, the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself.
It was the government that oppressed blacks, enforcing the laws that imprisoned them and hanged them for crimes grave and trivial, whipped them if they bolted for freedom and, in the Civil War, massacred them if they were captured fighting for the North. And yet if African Americans hesitate in embracing the mythical wonderfulness of America, they are accused of racism - of having the gall to know more about their own experience and history than Palin and others think they should.
Why do politicians such as Palin and commentators such as Glenn Beck insist that African Americans go blank on their own history - as blank as apparently Palin and Beck are themselves? Why must they insist that blacks join them in embracing a repellent history that once caused America to go to war with itself? Besides Princeton, Michelle Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School. It's hardly possible that she is not knowledgeable about the history of African Americans - no Ellis Island for them, immigrants in their colorful native dress waving at the camera. Should she forget it all simply because she went to Ivy League schools - be thankful for what she had gotten and the hell with the rest? Why should she be more grateful than Cindy McCain?
Sarah Palin teases that she might run for president. But she is unqualified - not just in the (let me count the) usual ways, but because she does not know the country. She could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic America. She knows more about grizzlies than she does about African Americans - and she clearly has more interest in the former than the latter. Did she once just pick up the phone and ask Michelle Obama what she meant by her remark? Did she ask about her background? What it was like at Princeton? What it was like for her parents or her grandparents? I can offer a hint. If they were driving to Washington, they slowed down and stopped where the sign said "colored" - and the irritated Palins of the time angrily hit the horn and went on their way.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Warren Buffet Thanks Obama for Saving the USA
From The Huffington Post -- November 21, 2010:
The billionaire below rejects socialism for the rich!!!
Feeling guilty due to having amassed such a great fortune thanks to the government and on the backs of Americans?
This is what billionaire Warren Buffett said: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/21/warren-buffett-paying-more-taxes_n_786516.html
"WASHINGTON -- Billionaire Warren Buffett rebutted claims that the Obama administration is unjustly hurting business orders with high taxes by saying that in fact, the wealthy have never had it so good.
"I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it," he told ABC's Christiane Amanpour in a clip played on "This Week" on Sunday.
When Amanpour pointed to critics' claims that the very wealthy need tax cuts to spur business and capitalism, Buffett replied, "The rich are always going to say that, you know, 'Just give us more money, and we'll go out and spend more, and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.' But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on."
On Tuesday, Buffett wrote a New York Times op-ed in the form of a letter to "Uncle Sam," thanking him for saving the U.S. economy:
When the crisis struck, I felt you would understand the role you had to play. But you've never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. You would have to improvise solutions on the run, stretch legal boundaries and avoid slowdowns, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it.
Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic -- and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.
Buffett isn't the only billionaire who has argued for higher taxes. Both Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his father, Bill Gates, Sr., recently came out in support of a Washington state measure to "create a 5 percent tax rate on annual income exceeding $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for couples, and a 9 percent tax rate on income that tops $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples."
Buffett has spoken out in the past about taxes for the wealthy, telling the Senate Finance Committee in 2007 that the estate tax should not be repealed. "I think we need to...take a little more out of the hides of guys like me," Buffett testified.
The billionaire below rejects socialism for the rich!!!
Feeling guilty due to having amassed such a great fortune thanks to the government and on the backs of Americans?
This is what billionaire Warren Buffett said: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/21/warren-buffett-paying-more-taxes_n_786516.html
"WASHINGTON -- Billionaire Warren Buffett rebutted claims that the Obama administration is unjustly hurting business orders with high taxes by saying that in fact, the wealthy have never had it so good.
"I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it," he told ABC's Christiane Amanpour in a clip played on "This Week" on Sunday.
When Amanpour pointed to critics' claims that the very wealthy need tax cuts to spur business and capitalism, Buffett replied, "The rich are always going to say that, you know, 'Just give us more money, and we'll go out and spend more, and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.' But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on."
On Tuesday, Buffett wrote a New York Times op-ed in the form of a letter to "Uncle Sam," thanking him for saving the U.S. economy:
When the crisis struck, I felt you would understand the role you had to play. But you've never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. You would have to improvise solutions on the run, stretch legal boundaries and avoid slowdowns, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it.
Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic -- and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.
Buffett isn't the only billionaire who has argued for higher taxes. Both Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his father, Bill Gates, Sr., recently came out in support of a Washington state measure to "create a 5 percent tax rate on annual income exceeding $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for couples, and a 9 percent tax rate on income that tops $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples."
Buffett has spoken out in the past about taxes for the wealthy, telling the Senate Finance Committee in 2007 that the estate tax should not be repealed. "I think we need to...take a little more out of the hides of guys like me," Buffett testified.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
George W. Bush is the Edith Piaf of Fiscal Policy -- He Regrets Nothing
From The Washington Post -- November 17, 2010:
In Memoir, Bush spins Fiscal Fiction
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
It was, or so I thought, a dandy column idea: an imaginary, missing chapter of George W. Bush's "Decision Points," in which the former president would admit to having made the wrong call on taxes.
The imaginary but completely delusional: My inner Bush would not regret pushing for the tax cuts. But he would acknowledge - how hard could this be? - that Alan Greenspan was right when he suggested a trigger mechanism to cancel the cuts if the promised surplus failed to materialize.
If only . . .
Of course, that surplus was a mirage. Rather than presiding over erasure of the publicly held national debt, Bush watched it grow from $5.6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion.
Like the surplus, my quasi-apologetic chapter evaporated in the face of reality. I read "Decision Points," and it turns out that Bush is the Edith Piaf of fiscal policy: He regrets nothing.
"For years, I listened to politicians from both sides of the aisle allege that I had squandered the massive surplus I inherited. That never made sense," Bush writes. "Much of the surplus was an illusion, based on the mistaken assumption that the 1990s boom would continue. Once the recession and 9/11 hit, there was little surplus left."
Now he tells us? This illusory surplus was the cornerstone on which Bush built his economic policy. "You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high, and government is charging more than it needs," Bush said in February 2001.
Far from sounding cautionary notes, the administration asserted its surplus estimates were, if anything, conservative. "If there's going to be a mistake, the likelihood is a mistake will be made on the other side of the scale, that more revenue will come in," press secretary Ari Fleischer said in March 2001. You know how that worked out.
"I took my responsibility to be a good fiscal steward seriously," Bush writes.
How's that? Bush chose to go to war, but, unlike any other wartime president, opted to pay the cost entirely with borrowed funds while pressing for additional tax cuts. He laments that he left behind "a serious long-term fiscal problem" of runaway entitlement spending but blames resistance from both parties in Congress - without acknowledging that he added an expensive and unpaid-for new entitlement, the Medicare prescription drug plan.
And those tax cuts. "It was true that tax cuts increase the deficit in the short term," Bush acknowledges. "But I believed the tax cuts, especially those on capital gains and dividends, would stimulate economic growth. The tax revenues from that growth, combined with spending restraint, would help lower the deficit."
This is cleverer than the usual supply-side formulation but still suffers from the tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves fallacy. Bush's own chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, has estimated that over the long run, cuts on investment taxes generate enough economic growth to make up only half of lost revenue.
Bush offers up a handy chart showing that he spent less (as a percentage of the economy) and ran lower deficits than his two Republican predecessors, and compared reasonably well to Bill Clinton.
Except Bush's averages are misleading. For one thing, he cherry-picks his fiscal years. He gives himself credit for the 2001 surplus, 1.3 percent of gross domestic product, even though that course was largely set when he took office. At the other end, Bush takes no responsibility for his piece of the ghastly 2009 deficit, 9.9 percent. Subtracting bailouts and stimulus spending, on the theory that much of the former will be repaid and the latter happened on President Obama's watch, the 2009 deficit would have totaled 6.8 percent of GDP, the largest since World War II.
More important, the trajectory tells a story that is less kind to Bush. He took office after three years in which Clinton had overseen surpluses. After 2001, Bush presided over seven straight years of deficits.
In short, Bush inherited a budget in healthy shape. He left it in tatters. The faltering economy played a supporting role, but the chief factors were of Bush's making: his tax cuts, his wars, his prescription drug bill. Without these, the country would have been running surpluses during his tenure. The wars will wind down, but the price of the tax cuts and prescription drug bill will climb even higher over the next decade.
Some stewardship.
In Memoir, Bush spins Fiscal Fiction
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
It was, or so I thought, a dandy column idea: an imaginary, missing chapter of George W. Bush's "Decision Points," in which the former president would admit to having made the wrong call on taxes.
The imaginary but completely delusional: My inner Bush would not regret pushing for the tax cuts. But he would acknowledge - how hard could this be? - that Alan Greenspan was right when he suggested a trigger mechanism to cancel the cuts if the promised surplus failed to materialize.
If only . . .
Of course, that surplus was a mirage. Rather than presiding over erasure of the publicly held national debt, Bush watched it grow from $5.6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion.
Like the surplus, my quasi-apologetic chapter evaporated in the face of reality. I read "Decision Points," and it turns out that Bush is the Edith Piaf of fiscal policy: He regrets nothing.
"For years, I listened to politicians from both sides of the aisle allege that I had squandered the massive surplus I inherited. That never made sense," Bush writes. "Much of the surplus was an illusion, based on the mistaken assumption that the 1990s boom would continue. Once the recession and 9/11 hit, there was little surplus left."
Now he tells us? This illusory surplus was the cornerstone on which Bush built his economic policy. "You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high, and government is charging more than it needs," Bush said in February 2001.
Far from sounding cautionary notes, the administration asserted its surplus estimates were, if anything, conservative. "If there's going to be a mistake, the likelihood is a mistake will be made on the other side of the scale, that more revenue will come in," press secretary Ari Fleischer said in March 2001. You know how that worked out.
"I took my responsibility to be a good fiscal steward seriously," Bush writes.
How's that? Bush chose to go to war, but, unlike any other wartime president, opted to pay the cost entirely with borrowed funds while pressing for additional tax cuts. He laments that he left behind "a serious long-term fiscal problem" of runaway entitlement spending but blames resistance from both parties in Congress - without acknowledging that he added an expensive and unpaid-for new entitlement, the Medicare prescription drug plan.
And those tax cuts. "It was true that tax cuts increase the deficit in the short term," Bush acknowledges. "But I believed the tax cuts, especially those on capital gains and dividends, would stimulate economic growth. The tax revenues from that growth, combined with spending restraint, would help lower the deficit."
This is cleverer than the usual supply-side formulation but still suffers from the tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves fallacy. Bush's own chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, has estimated that over the long run, cuts on investment taxes generate enough economic growth to make up only half of lost revenue.
Bush offers up a handy chart showing that he spent less (as a percentage of the economy) and ran lower deficits than his two Republican predecessors, and compared reasonably well to Bill Clinton.
Except Bush's averages are misleading. For one thing, he cherry-picks his fiscal years. He gives himself credit for the 2001 surplus, 1.3 percent of gross domestic product, even though that course was largely set when he took office. At the other end, Bush takes no responsibility for his piece of the ghastly 2009 deficit, 9.9 percent. Subtracting bailouts and stimulus spending, on the theory that much of the former will be repaid and the latter happened on President Obama's watch, the 2009 deficit would have totaled 6.8 percent of GDP, the largest since World War II.
More important, the trajectory tells a story that is less kind to Bush. He took office after three years in which Clinton had overseen surpluses. After 2001, Bush presided over seven straight years of deficits.
In short, Bush inherited a budget in healthy shape. He left it in tatters. The faltering economy played a supporting role, but the chief factors were of Bush's making: his tax cuts, his wars, his prescription drug bill. Without these, the country would have been running surpluses during his tenure. The wars will wind down, but the price of the tax cuts and prescription drug bill will climb even higher over the next decade.
Some stewardship.
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Phony Distorted Bush Rehabilitation Tour
From Media Matters For America -- November 15, 2010:
Numerous media figures have interviewed former President George W. Bush following the November 9 release of his book, Decision Points. Bush and his interviewers used these interviews as an opportunity to rewrite his presidency by promoting false claims and misinformation about Bush's tenure.
CLAIM: Bush falsely claims "everybody," "all of us" thought Saddam had WMDs during interviews with Hannity and Van Susteren.
CLAIM: Bush claims, "We just didn't have any solid record of intelligence that gave us a warning" on the 9-11 attacks.
CLAIM: Bush advances disputed claim that waterboarding "saved lives."
CLAIM: Limbaugh misleadingly suggests Bush "inherited a terrorism crisis" and an "economic crisis" from President Clinton.
CLAIM: Limbaugh and Bush blame "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" on Democrats.
CLAIM: Bush repeats falsehood that tax cuts on the rich help small businesses.
CLAIM: Hannity and Limbaugh allow Bush to claim that he wanted to "change the tone" in Washington by not engaging in "name-calling."
Interviewers encourage falsehoods, fail to challenge Bush's distortions
NBC host Matt Lauer, radio host Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren all interviewed Bush in the days following his book release. Each either allowed Bush to rewrite history by making false claims, or made false claims themselves, or both. For instance:
CLAIM: Bush falsely claims "everybody," "all of us" thought Saddam had WMDs during interviews with Hannity and Van Susteren. During the interview that aired November 9, Hannity asked Bush about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. Bush then claimed that "everybody ... every intelligence service, everybody in the administration" believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs. From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
HANNITY: You talked a little about WMD. When Saddam didn't use WMD on our troops, I was relieved. You talk about the absence of WMD stockpiles. Frustrating for you?
BUSH: Unbelievably frustrating. Of course, it was frustrating. Everybody thought he had WMD, everybody being every intelligence service, everybody in the administration.
HANNITY: A lot of Democrats said it.
BUSH: Yes, a lot of members of Congress.
During the interview with Van Susteren that aired November 12, Bush again said that "all [of] us who studied the intelligence felt [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction." From the transcript of the interview:
VAN SUSTEREN: After Afghanistan, of course, there was Iraq. And I don't want to beat a dead horse, because you talk about weapons of mass destruction, and throughout your book you say you wish you would have pushed harder.
Here is what I don't understand. Then Secretary of State Powell went before the U.N. and he gave his -- made the case for the United States that there were -- why we should go in, the weapons of mass destruction.
Then later in the book he is the one putting on the brakes. Why did he do that? He later said I didn't think there were weapons of mass destruction, but he made the case.
BUSH: I don't think, I don't view Colin Powell as backing away from the belief that all of us had, including intelligence services, that he had weapons of mass destruction. We all felt that. The country felt it.
VAN SUSTEREN: The world felt it. But we all got it wrong.
BUSH: The Congress passed an overwhelming resolution authorizing the use of force if need be. Iraq felt it. Many of those people became critics later on, but all us who studied the intelligence felt he had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think Colin Powell is walking away from that.
I do think Colin was hoping that diplomacy would work and we wouldn't have to use military. All of us hoped diplomacy would work. There is an instructive scene in the book where he is saying the military option is a concern. But at one point in time I said, "If diplomacy runs its course, would you support military action in Iraq?" He said he would.
VAN SUSTEREN: I guess I had a sense as he was ex-military at that point. He had spoken to the CIA and he was making the case, that for some reason I always thought that he made a big blunder.
BUSH: That he felt he made a big blunder?
VAN SUSTEREN: No, that he did and that he's never.
BUSH: The blunder being?
VAN SUSTEREN: That there was weapons of mass destruction.
BUSH: First of all, Colin Powell is a very thorough man and he wouldn't have gone to the U.N. unless he was convinced intelligence available to all of us was real. It turns out it wasn't.
But he made a very compelling presentation that convinced the U.N. to -- and the world that our intelligence was right. But it just wasn't our intelligence. It was the intelligence of all kinds of major intelligence agencies around the world.
The amazing thing is that Saddam Hussein was unwilling to admit that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. I firmly believed the choice was his to make.
FACT: There was disagreement within the intelligence community over whether there were WMDs in Iraq. As Media Matters has previously documented, there was disagreement within the intelligence community during the early 2000s about Saddam's possible weapons programs. A June 2008 report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that while the CIA expressed concern in April 2001 about Iraq's attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes, the Department of Energy and the Department of State disagreed with the CIA's conclusion that this was definitive evidence that Saddam was trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. From the report:
(U) The Department of Energy (DOE) disagreed with the CIA's conclusions regarding the aluminum tubes, and assessed that it was more likely that the tubes were intended for a different use, such as a conventional rocket program. Based on other evidence, including Saddam's meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, and possible attempts to procure uranium from Niger, the DOE assessed in July 2002 that Saddam Hussein might be attempting to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program, but suggested that the evidence was not conclusive.
(U) The Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (State/INR) disagreed with the CIA that Iraq had restarted a nuclear weapons program, and concurred with the DOE that the aluminum tubes were probably intended for other purposes. This view was included in congressional testimony in September 2002, but State/INR did not publish any reports on the aluminum tubes outside of the State Department until after publication of the October 2002 NIE.
FACT: Senate Intel. report found that statements made by both Bush and Cheney contradicted available intelligence information. From the Senate Intelligence report:
(U) Conclusion 15: Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, and was unwilling to conduct terrorist attacks [sic] the US using conventional, chemical or biological weapons at that time, in part because he feared doing so would give the US a stronger case for war with Iraq. This judgment was echoed by both earlier and later intelligence community assessments. All of these assessments noted that gauging Saddam's intentions was quite difficult, and most suggested that he would be more likely to initiate hostilities if he felt that a US invasion was imminent.
CLAIM: Bush claims, "We just didn't have any solid record of intelligence that gave us a warning" on the 9-11 attacks. During his November 9 interview with Lauer, Bush said, "We just didn't have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this," referring to the 9-11 attacks. Lauer did not challenge this statement. From the transcript of the interview:
LAUER: Based on some of the intelligence briefings you had gotten did you not have any idea...
BUSH: No.
LAUER: ...Who was behind this?
BUSH: I mean we all surmised it was al Qaeda but before you make a decision to go find somebody you wanna make sure the intelligence is as good as it can get. And the next couple of days were heard all kinds of chatter and celebratory talk and so it became clear it was al Qaeda.
LAUER: Did you ever ask yourself the question, "What more could I have done," to prevent this from happening?
BUSH: Well, we just didn't have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this. We didn't have any clear intelligence that said you know, "Get ready. They're gonna fly airplanes into New York buildings."
FACT: The Bush administration had warnings that Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were planning an attack on the U.S. and were criticized for downplaying threat of terrorism. The bipartisan 9-11 Commission concluded in July 2004 that both "the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the gravity of the threat from Al Qaeda," though the Commission did not address whether the 9-11 attacks could have been prevented. According to The New York Times, the report found that "senior officials were repeatedly warned about Osama bin Laden's intentions, but failed to respond with an aggressive sense of national purpose."
In August 2001, Bush received an intelligence report titled, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." The memo warned that FBI "information ... indicates patters of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." However, despite this, the 9-11 Commission reported that "[n]o CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report." The 9-11 Commission reported that then-CIA Director George Tenet said that during the summer before the September 11, 2001, attacks, "the system was blinking red." The report noted, "The intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist of possible multiple-but not necessarily simultaneous-attacks."
CLAIM: Bush advances disputed claim that waterboarding "saved lives." During the interview with Lauer, Bush claimed that waterboarding, particularly as used against Al Qaeda chief officer Khalid Sheik Mohammed, "saved lives." From the interview:
BUSH: Let-- let-- let's talk about waterboarding.
LAUER: Okay.
BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda... ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows." And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
BUSH: Well--
LAUER: Tom Kean, who a former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 commission said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
BUSH: He obviously doesn't know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That's why I've written the book. He can, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. But I will tell you this. Using those techniques saved lives. My job is to protect America and I did.
FACT: Bush's claim is disputed by intelligence experts. As Media Matters has previously documented, intelligence officials have questioned the effectiveness of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report concluded that "the effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured." During his May 2009 Senate testimony, CIA interrogator Ali Soufan said such techniques "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda." A Washington Post article reported that Khalid Sheik Mohammed told the Red Cross, "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information ... in order to make the ill-treatment stop."
CLAIM: Limbaugh misleadingly suggests Bush "inherited a terrorism crisis" and an "economic crisis" from President Clinton. During his November 9 on-air interview of Bush, Limbaugh, referring to Obama's references to the Bush administration, asked Bush, "Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton, or an economic crisis?" From the transcript of the November 9 edition The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: I mean you are being blamed for the economy today. The current occupant constantly runs around saying I inherited this mess from you. Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton or an economic crisis?
FACT: The Clinton administration stressed the importance of terrorism to Bush officials, and the recession began after Bush took office. Prior to the March 2004 commission hearings investigating the 9-11 attacks, senior Clinton administration officials maintained that they repeatedly warned their Bush counterparts in 2000 that Al Qaeda posed a serious threat to the U.S. Members of the commission concluded, according to The New York Times, that "a series of intelligence reports sent to President Bush in 2001 warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda."
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the recession began in March 2001, during Bush's presidency. NBER noted in November 2001:
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology.
CLAIM: Limbaugh and Bush blame "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" on Democrats. In his interview with Bush, Limbaugh said that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" were "a brainchild of the Democrats." Bush agreed, saying, "Yeah, that's right." From the transcript of the interview:
RUSH: If you had it to do over...? You were talking about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. If you had it to do over, would you do the TARP bailout?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, I would have, because -- and I think the reader will -
RUSH: What were you told about that? What did they tell you that made it...?
PRESIDENT BUSH: We were headed for a second depression. You know, they didn't say quite that way. You know, it was a little more nuanced than that but, "If you don't do something big, we could see a second depression, or a depression bigger than the second depression," and, you know, if you're the president, you don't have time to gamble. And I didn't like using taxpayers' money to bail out the people that got us in trouble. I didn't like it at all, but when you're president you get faced with stark choices, and I couldn't have lived with myself had the country gone into a deep depression, and people's lives would have been affected. People thrown out of work. There are a lot of people out of work today and all of us are concerned about that but the situation could have been a lot worse.
RUSH: Well, you talk about people that got us into trouble. Some people think it wasn't Wall Street by themselves. Some people think it was the Democrat Party. You talk about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess. That was a brainchild of the Democrats.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, that's right.
RUSH: We bailed the Democrats out of a problem, too, and they continue to this day to blame you and the Republicans for it. Although I don't think they're getting away with it any longer. The election returns, I think, signal that. We're talking with former President Bush. We have to take a brief time-out. His new book, Decision Points, is published today.
FACT: Economists reject claims that Fannie and Freddie were the root cause of the financial crisis. As Media Matters has previously documented, economists widely agree that Fannie and Freddie were not the root cause of the financial crisis. For example, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote on July 14, 2009, that "while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren't responsible for the mess we're in." Krugman further wrote that "Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble."
FACT: Republican-controlled Congress failed to pass regulatory reform of Fannie and Freddie, which Bush purportedly wanted. Earlier in the interview, Bush told Limbaugh that "powerful forces in Congress resisted" reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003. From the transcript of the November 9 interview (emphasis added):
RUSH: Now, look, one thing about the predecessor and so forth. You were president of the United States. You were the leader of the country. You were elected twice by the people of this country on substantive issues. Now we find ourselves in a really challenging economic time, and it is being said that you "drove the economy in the ditch." You were behind the wheel in the car. Now, Mr. President, the people... We can't relate to being president. We can only try to understand it, and when we do -- when we hear ourselves being blamed for things that we have nothing to do with -- our tendency would be to respond to it, to try to correct the record. But in your book, you steer clear.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, on this issue, I don't steer clear because I remind the reader that on the issue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I saw a problem, and went to Congress and said, "Look, this is a group of... These are enterprises that have got an implicit government guarantee and they're taking risky stances, and, therefore, we ought to regulate them. If they've got an implicit government guarantee there ought to be some sense of regulation and make sure they don't misuse that guarantee, and I make it clear in the book what happened, and that is that powerful forces in Congress resisted that reform. Whether those reforms had taken place in 2003 it's hard to predict whether or not this crisis would have occurred, but I'm comfortable in telling the reader and comfortable that history will judge that we tried to do something about it. You know, and eventually the truth wins out, and this book is an attempt to set the record straight from my perspective.
In his interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, which aired November 11 on The O'Reilly Factor, Bush again said that the 108th Congress "much to our chagrin, said no, we are not going to regulate [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], because they are very powerful entities." From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
O'REILLY: I thought [the chapter on the economic meltdown] was a very interesting chapter. But, here was what I don't understand and a lot of other people don't understand. Why didn't you, as president of the United States, know that this derivative mortgage backed security con was in motion? Because you say "I was caught by surprise?"
BUSH: True. There is an awareness in that last chapter that we saw something amiss, because we tried to get the government to regulate Fanny [sic] and Freddie. But, I don't know of anybody in my administration, who saw the enormity of the collapse.
In 2003, because of the implicit government guarantee and because we were worried about some of the investments that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were making that congress, much to our chagrin said no, we are not going to regulate it because they are very powerful entities.
And, so to some extent I feel, you know, OK about anticipating a crisis. The other thing I didn't really didn't see the enormity, but I really didn't. I don't think this is a matter of regulation. I think this is a matter of people making bad investments.
Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress during the 108th Congress, which was in session from 2003-04.
CLAIM: Bush repeats falsehood that tax cuts on the rich help small businesses. During a November 10 live interview on NBC's Today, Lauer asked Bush to give his argument in favor of extending the tax cuts for the wealthy that were put enacted during Bush's presidency. Bush responded: From the interview:
LAUER: While we're talking about taxpayers, there's a heated debate right now over whether we should continue in this country with your tax policies.
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: They call them the Bush tax cuts. Give me your best argument for continuing those tax cuts.
BUSH: Here's the deal. Most new jobs are created by small businesses. Many small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax level, because of how they are organized -- for example, subchapter S corporations or limited partnerships. Therefore, if you raise the top rate, you're taxing job creators.
FACT: The majority of small businesses would be unaffected by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. As Media Matters has repeatedly pointed out, at least 97 percent of small businesses would not pay higher taxes if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire. According to the Tax Policy Center's table of 2007 tax returns that reported business income, 481,000 of those returns, or 2 percent, were in the top two income brackets. And according to PolitiFact, the Joint Committee on Taxation has projected that in 2011, "Only 3 percent of all taxpayers who reported having positive business income will see their taxes go up under the proposed Democratic initiative" of letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire.
CLAIM: Hannity and Limbaugh allow Bush to claim that he wanted to "change the tone" in Washington by not engaging in "name-calling." During his taped interview with Hannity, which aired on the November 9 edition of Hannity's Fox News show, Bush claimed that he wanted to "change the tone [in Washington] by not participating in the name-calling." From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
HANNITY: Washington's tone doesn't seem to get changed. Is it something that just -- is the reality of the way it's going to be?
BUSH: I think -- I think to a certain extent that's the way it's going to be. I mean Abraham Lincoln wanted to change -- wished the tone in Washington was different when people started calling him baboon.
George Washington interestingly enough was harshly criticized at the end of his presidency. Ronald Reagan, my dad, everybody goes through -- if you're the president, there's a lot of criticism.
In my case, I did my best to change the tone by not participating in the name-calling or you know --
HANNITY: You don't participate in it now.
BUSH: No, I don't. I'm --
HANNITY: You've been quiet.
During his interview with Bush, Limbaugh referenced comments that Sen. Harry Reid allegedly made about the war in Iraq. Bush again claimed, "I still don't think it's right to engage in name-calling if you're the president of the United States." From the transcript of the November 9 interview:
RUSH: Why didn't you do more about [Reid's comments]? Why didn't you comment more about it at the time? I mean, I asked you once, and you said that you didn't want to sully the office of the presidency by descending to base political level. But I mean this was not simply base politics. This was keeping the country safe.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I understand that, but on the other hand I do believe in the institution of the presidency, and I didn't think it was right then, I still don't think it's right to engage in name-calling if you're the president of the United States. I was focused on the mission, as were the troops. And, because of their bravery and sacrifice, the situation turned around shortly after that statement. I've discussed this with other people in my administration, when they call me a liar should I have called them names, and my attitude was no then, obviously, and I still feel very strongly that's the way a president ought to conduct himself.
FACT: Bush and his administration repeatedly launched personal attacks on opponents. On September 10, 2006, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused critics of the Iraq war of aiding terrorists, saying on NBC's Meet the Press, "Suggestions ... that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists." On the Senate floor in 2004, Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to go "f--- yourself" after Leahy questioned Cheney's ties to Halliburton. In September 2000, Bush himself was recorded calling New York Times reporter Adam Clymer a "major league asshole" at a Labor Day event in Illinois. Following his criticism of the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims, Bush administration officials launched a smear campaign against Ambassador Joe Wilson, culminating in the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, who was at the time a covert CIA operative.
Numerous media figures have interviewed former President George W. Bush following the November 9 release of his book, Decision Points. Bush and his interviewers used these interviews as an opportunity to rewrite his presidency by promoting false claims and misinformation about Bush's tenure.
CLAIM: Bush falsely claims "everybody," "all of us" thought Saddam had WMDs during interviews with Hannity and Van Susteren.
CLAIM: Bush claims, "We just didn't have any solid record of intelligence that gave us a warning" on the 9-11 attacks.
CLAIM: Bush advances disputed claim that waterboarding "saved lives."
CLAIM: Limbaugh misleadingly suggests Bush "inherited a terrorism crisis" and an "economic crisis" from President Clinton.
CLAIM: Limbaugh and Bush blame "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" on Democrats.
CLAIM: Bush repeats falsehood that tax cuts on the rich help small businesses.
CLAIM: Hannity and Limbaugh allow Bush to claim that he wanted to "change the tone" in Washington by not engaging in "name-calling."
Interviewers encourage falsehoods, fail to challenge Bush's distortions
NBC host Matt Lauer, radio host Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren all interviewed Bush in the days following his book release. Each either allowed Bush to rewrite history by making false claims, or made false claims themselves, or both. For instance:
CLAIM: Bush falsely claims "everybody," "all of us" thought Saddam had WMDs during interviews with Hannity and Van Susteren. During the interview that aired November 9, Hannity asked Bush about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. Bush then claimed that "everybody ... every intelligence service, everybody in the administration" believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs. From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
HANNITY: You talked a little about WMD. When Saddam didn't use WMD on our troops, I was relieved. You talk about the absence of WMD stockpiles. Frustrating for you?
BUSH: Unbelievably frustrating. Of course, it was frustrating. Everybody thought he had WMD, everybody being every intelligence service, everybody in the administration.
HANNITY: A lot of Democrats said it.
BUSH: Yes, a lot of members of Congress.
During the interview with Van Susteren that aired November 12, Bush again said that "all [of] us who studied the intelligence felt [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction." From the transcript of the interview:
VAN SUSTEREN: After Afghanistan, of course, there was Iraq. And I don't want to beat a dead horse, because you talk about weapons of mass destruction, and throughout your book you say you wish you would have pushed harder.
Here is what I don't understand. Then Secretary of State Powell went before the U.N. and he gave his -- made the case for the United States that there were -- why we should go in, the weapons of mass destruction.
Then later in the book he is the one putting on the brakes. Why did he do that? He later said I didn't think there were weapons of mass destruction, but he made the case.
BUSH: I don't think, I don't view Colin Powell as backing away from the belief that all of us had, including intelligence services, that he had weapons of mass destruction. We all felt that. The country felt it.
VAN SUSTEREN: The world felt it. But we all got it wrong.
BUSH: The Congress passed an overwhelming resolution authorizing the use of force if need be. Iraq felt it. Many of those people became critics later on, but all us who studied the intelligence felt he had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think Colin Powell is walking away from that.
I do think Colin was hoping that diplomacy would work and we wouldn't have to use military. All of us hoped diplomacy would work. There is an instructive scene in the book where he is saying the military option is a concern. But at one point in time I said, "If diplomacy runs its course, would you support military action in Iraq?" He said he would.
VAN SUSTEREN: I guess I had a sense as he was ex-military at that point. He had spoken to the CIA and he was making the case, that for some reason I always thought that he made a big blunder.
BUSH: That he felt he made a big blunder?
VAN SUSTEREN: No, that he did and that he's never.
BUSH: The blunder being?
VAN SUSTEREN: That there was weapons of mass destruction.
BUSH: First of all, Colin Powell is a very thorough man and he wouldn't have gone to the U.N. unless he was convinced intelligence available to all of us was real. It turns out it wasn't.
But he made a very compelling presentation that convinced the U.N. to -- and the world that our intelligence was right. But it just wasn't our intelligence. It was the intelligence of all kinds of major intelligence agencies around the world.
The amazing thing is that Saddam Hussein was unwilling to admit that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. I firmly believed the choice was his to make.
FACT: There was disagreement within the intelligence community over whether there were WMDs in Iraq. As Media Matters has previously documented, there was disagreement within the intelligence community during the early 2000s about Saddam's possible weapons programs. A June 2008 report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that while the CIA expressed concern in April 2001 about Iraq's attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes, the Department of Energy and the Department of State disagreed with the CIA's conclusion that this was definitive evidence that Saddam was trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. From the report:
(U) The Department of Energy (DOE) disagreed with the CIA's conclusions regarding the aluminum tubes, and assessed that it was more likely that the tubes were intended for a different use, such as a conventional rocket program. Based on other evidence, including Saddam's meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, and possible attempts to procure uranium from Niger, the DOE assessed in July 2002 that Saddam Hussein might be attempting to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program, but suggested that the evidence was not conclusive.
(U) The Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (State/INR) disagreed with the CIA that Iraq had restarted a nuclear weapons program, and concurred with the DOE that the aluminum tubes were probably intended for other purposes. This view was included in congressional testimony in September 2002, but State/INR did not publish any reports on the aluminum tubes outside of the State Department until after publication of the October 2002 NIE.
FACT: Senate Intel. report found that statements made by both Bush and Cheney contradicted available intelligence information. From the Senate Intelligence report:
(U) Conclusion 15: Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, and was unwilling to conduct terrorist attacks [sic] the US using conventional, chemical or biological weapons at that time, in part because he feared doing so would give the US a stronger case for war with Iraq. This judgment was echoed by both earlier and later intelligence community assessments. All of these assessments noted that gauging Saddam's intentions was quite difficult, and most suggested that he would be more likely to initiate hostilities if he felt that a US invasion was imminent.
CLAIM: Bush claims, "We just didn't have any solid record of intelligence that gave us a warning" on the 9-11 attacks. During his November 9 interview with Lauer, Bush said, "We just didn't have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this," referring to the 9-11 attacks. Lauer did not challenge this statement. From the transcript of the interview:
LAUER: Based on some of the intelligence briefings you had gotten did you not have any idea...
BUSH: No.
LAUER: ...Who was behind this?
BUSH: I mean we all surmised it was al Qaeda but before you make a decision to go find somebody you wanna make sure the intelligence is as good as it can get. And the next couple of days were heard all kinds of chatter and celebratory talk and so it became clear it was al Qaeda.
LAUER: Did you ever ask yourself the question, "What more could I have done," to prevent this from happening?
BUSH: Well, we just didn't have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this. We didn't have any clear intelligence that said you know, "Get ready. They're gonna fly airplanes into New York buildings."
FACT: The Bush administration had warnings that Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were planning an attack on the U.S. and were criticized for downplaying threat of terrorism. The bipartisan 9-11 Commission concluded in July 2004 that both "the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the gravity of the threat from Al Qaeda," though the Commission did not address whether the 9-11 attacks could have been prevented. According to The New York Times, the report found that "senior officials were repeatedly warned about Osama bin Laden's intentions, but failed to respond with an aggressive sense of national purpose."
In August 2001, Bush received an intelligence report titled, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." The memo warned that FBI "information ... indicates patters of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." However, despite this, the 9-11 Commission reported that "[n]o CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report." The 9-11 Commission reported that then-CIA Director George Tenet said that during the summer before the September 11, 2001, attacks, "the system was blinking red." The report noted, "The intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist of possible multiple-but not necessarily simultaneous-attacks."
CLAIM: Bush advances disputed claim that waterboarding "saved lives." During the interview with Lauer, Bush claimed that waterboarding, particularly as used against Al Qaeda chief officer Khalid Sheik Mohammed, "saved lives." From the interview:
BUSH: Let-- let-- let's talk about waterboarding.
LAUER: Okay.
BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda... ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows." And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
BUSH: Well--
LAUER: Tom Kean, who a former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 commission said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
BUSH: He obviously doesn't know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That's why I've written the book. He can, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. But I will tell you this. Using those techniques saved lives. My job is to protect America and I did.
FACT: Bush's claim is disputed by intelligence experts. As Media Matters has previously documented, intelligence officials have questioned the effectiveness of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report concluded that "the effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured." During his May 2009 Senate testimony, CIA interrogator Ali Soufan said such techniques "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda." A Washington Post article reported that Khalid Sheik Mohammed told the Red Cross, "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information ... in order to make the ill-treatment stop."
CLAIM: Limbaugh misleadingly suggests Bush "inherited a terrorism crisis" and an "economic crisis" from President Clinton. During his November 9 on-air interview of Bush, Limbaugh, referring to Obama's references to the Bush administration, asked Bush, "Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton, or an economic crisis?" From the transcript of the November 9 edition The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: I mean you are being blamed for the economy today. The current occupant constantly runs around saying I inherited this mess from you. Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton or an economic crisis?
FACT: The Clinton administration stressed the importance of terrorism to Bush officials, and the recession began after Bush took office. Prior to the March 2004 commission hearings investigating the 9-11 attacks, senior Clinton administration officials maintained that they repeatedly warned their Bush counterparts in 2000 that Al Qaeda posed a serious threat to the U.S. Members of the commission concluded, according to The New York Times, that "a series of intelligence reports sent to President Bush in 2001 warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda."
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the recession began in March 2001, during Bush's presidency. NBER noted in November 2001:
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology.
CLAIM: Limbaugh and Bush blame "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" on Democrats. In his interview with Bush, Limbaugh said that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" were "a brainchild of the Democrats." Bush agreed, saying, "Yeah, that's right." From the transcript of the interview:
RUSH: If you had it to do over...? You were talking about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. If you had it to do over, would you do the TARP bailout?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, I would have, because -- and I think the reader will -
RUSH: What were you told about that? What did they tell you that made it...?
PRESIDENT BUSH: We were headed for a second depression. You know, they didn't say quite that way. You know, it was a little more nuanced than that but, "If you don't do something big, we could see a second depression, or a depression bigger than the second depression," and, you know, if you're the president, you don't have time to gamble. And I didn't like using taxpayers' money to bail out the people that got us in trouble. I didn't like it at all, but when you're president you get faced with stark choices, and I couldn't have lived with myself had the country gone into a deep depression, and people's lives would have been affected. People thrown out of work. There are a lot of people out of work today and all of us are concerned about that but the situation could have been a lot worse.
RUSH: Well, you talk about people that got us into trouble. Some people think it wasn't Wall Street by themselves. Some people think it was the Democrat Party. You talk about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess. That was a brainchild of the Democrats.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, that's right.
RUSH: We bailed the Democrats out of a problem, too, and they continue to this day to blame you and the Republicans for it. Although I don't think they're getting away with it any longer. The election returns, I think, signal that. We're talking with former President Bush. We have to take a brief time-out. His new book, Decision Points, is published today.
FACT: Economists reject claims that Fannie and Freddie were the root cause of the financial crisis. As Media Matters has previously documented, economists widely agree that Fannie and Freddie were not the root cause of the financial crisis. For example, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote on July 14, 2009, that "while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren't responsible for the mess we're in." Krugman further wrote that "Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble."
FACT: Republican-controlled Congress failed to pass regulatory reform of Fannie and Freddie, which Bush purportedly wanted. Earlier in the interview, Bush told Limbaugh that "powerful forces in Congress resisted" reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003. From the transcript of the November 9 interview (emphasis added):
RUSH: Now, look, one thing about the predecessor and so forth. You were president of the United States. You were the leader of the country. You were elected twice by the people of this country on substantive issues. Now we find ourselves in a really challenging economic time, and it is being said that you "drove the economy in the ditch." You were behind the wheel in the car. Now, Mr. President, the people... We can't relate to being president. We can only try to understand it, and when we do -- when we hear ourselves being blamed for things that we have nothing to do with -- our tendency would be to respond to it, to try to correct the record. But in your book, you steer clear.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, on this issue, I don't steer clear because I remind the reader that on the issue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I saw a problem, and went to Congress and said, "Look, this is a group of... These are enterprises that have got an implicit government guarantee and they're taking risky stances, and, therefore, we ought to regulate them. If they've got an implicit government guarantee there ought to be some sense of regulation and make sure they don't misuse that guarantee, and I make it clear in the book what happened, and that is that powerful forces in Congress resisted that reform. Whether those reforms had taken place in 2003 it's hard to predict whether or not this crisis would have occurred, but I'm comfortable in telling the reader and comfortable that history will judge that we tried to do something about it. You know, and eventually the truth wins out, and this book is an attempt to set the record straight from my perspective.
In his interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, which aired November 11 on The O'Reilly Factor, Bush again said that the 108th Congress "much to our chagrin, said no, we are not going to regulate [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], because they are very powerful entities." From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
O'REILLY: I thought [the chapter on the economic meltdown] was a very interesting chapter. But, here was what I don't understand and a lot of other people don't understand. Why didn't you, as president of the United States, know that this derivative mortgage backed security con was in motion? Because you say "I was caught by surprise?"
BUSH: True. There is an awareness in that last chapter that we saw something amiss, because we tried to get the government to regulate Fanny [sic] and Freddie. But, I don't know of anybody in my administration, who saw the enormity of the collapse.
In 2003, because of the implicit government guarantee and because we were worried about some of the investments that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were making that congress, much to our chagrin said no, we are not going to regulate it because they are very powerful entities.
And, so to some extent I feel, you know, OK about anticipating a crisis. The other thing I didn't really didn't see the enormity, but I really didn't. I don't think this is a matter of regulation. I think this is a matter of people making bad investments.
Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress during the 108th Congress, which was in session from 2003-04.
CLAIM: Bush repeats falsehood that tax cuts on the rich help small businesses. During a November 10 live interview on NBC's Today, Lauer asked Bush to give his argument in favor of extending the tax cuts for the wealthy that were put enacted during Bush's presidency. Bush responded: From the interview:
LAUER: While we're talking about taxpayers, there's a heated debate right now over whether we should continue in this country with your tax policies.
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: They call them the Bush tax cuts. Give me your best argument for continuing those tax cuts.
BUSH: Here's the deal. Most new jobs are created by small businesses. Many small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax level, because of how they are organized -- for example, subchapter S corporations or limited partnerships. Therefore, if you raise the top rate, you're taxing job creators.
FACT: The majority of small businesses would be unaffected by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. As Media Matters has repeatedly pointed out, at least 97 percent of small businesses would not pay higher taxes if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire. According to the Tax Policy Center's table of 2007 tax returns that reported business income, 481,000 of those returns, or 2 percent, were in the top two income brackets. And according to PolitiFact, the Joint Committee on Taxation has projected that in 2011, "Only 3 percent of all taxpayers who reported having positive business income will see their taxes go up under the proposed Democratic initiative" of letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire.
CLAIM: Hannity and Limbaugh allow Bush to claim that he wanted to "change the tone" in Washington by not engaging in "name-calling." During his taped interview with Hannity, which aired on the November 9 edition of Hannity's Fox News show, Bush claimed that he wanted to "change the tone [in Washington] by not participating in the name-calling." From the Nexis transcript of the interview:
HANNITY: Washington's tone doesn't seem to get changed. Is it something that just -- is the reality of the way it's going to be?
BUSH: I think -- I think to a certain extent that's the way it's going to be. I mean Abraham Lincoln wanted to change -- wished the tone in Washington was different when people started calling him baboon.
George Washington interestingly enough was harshly criticized at the end of his presidency. Ronald Reagan, my dad, everybody goes through -- if you're the president, there's a lot of criticism.
In my case, I did my best to change the tone by not participating in the name-calling or you know --
HANNITY: You don't participate in it now.
BUSH: No, I don't. I'm --
HANNITY: You've been quiet.
During his interview with Bush, Limbaugh referenced comments that Sen. Harry Reid allegedly made about the war in Iraq. Bush again claimed, "I still don't think it's right to engage in name-calling if you're the president of the United States." From the transcript of the November 9 interview:
RUSH: Why didn't you do more about [Reid's comments]? Why didn't you comment more about it at the time? I mean, I asked you once, and you said that you didn't want to sully the office of the presidency by descending to base political level. But I mean this was not simply base politics. This was keeping the country safe.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I understand that, but on the other hand I do believe in the institution of the presidency, and I didn't think it was right then, I still don't think it's right to engage in name-calling if you're the president of the United States. I was focused on the mission, as were the troops. And, because of their bravery and sacrifice, the situation turned around shortly after that statement. I've discussed this with other people in my administration, when they call me a liar should I have called them names, and my attitude was no then, obviously, and I still feel very strongly that's the way a president ought to conduct himself.
FACT: Bush and his administration repeatedly launched personal attacks on opponents. On September 10, 2006, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused critics of the Iraq war of aiding terrorists, saying on NBC's Meet the Press, "Suggestions ... that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists." On the Senate floor in 2004, Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to go "f--- yourself" after Leahy questioned Cheney's ties to Halliburton. In September 2000, Bush himself was recorded calling New York Times reporter Adam Clymer a "major league asshole" at a Labor Day event in Illinois. Following his criticism of the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims, Bush administration officials launched a smear campaign against Ambassador Joe Wilson, culminating in the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, who was at the time a covert CIA operative.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Nazis were Given Safe Haven in the United States after World War II
From The New York Times -- November 13, 2010:
Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.
Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.
The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.
The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.
The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.
More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.
In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.
The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.
The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)
The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”
Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.
Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.
The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.
In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”
After the case was dismissed, radical Jewish groups urged violence against Mr. Soobzokov, and he was killed in 1985 by a bomb at his home in Paterson, N.J.
The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.
The Nazi-hunting report was the brainchild of Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer. In 1999, he persuaded Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at what he saw as a critical piece of history, and he assigned a career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job. After Mr. Richard edited the final version in 2006, he urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed, colleagues said.
When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the report’s publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died, the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.
“I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released,” Ms. Feigin said. “It broke his heart.”
After Mr. Richard’s death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the report’s release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Justice Department initially fought the lawsuit, but finally gave Mr. Sobel a partial copy — with more than 1,000 passages and references deleted based on exemptions for privacy and internal deliberations.
Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is committed to transparency, and that redactions are made by experienced lawyers.
The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.
Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.
So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.
The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.’s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.
It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.
After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengele’s scalp on privacy grounds.
Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.
A chapter on the O.S.I.’s most publicized failure — the case against John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who was mistakenly identified as Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible — deletes dozens of details, including part of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.
That section also omits a passage disclosing that Latvian émigrés sympathetic to Mr. Demjanjuk secretly arranged for the O.S.I.’s trash to be delivered to them each day from 1985 to 1987. The émigrés rifled through the garbage to find classified documents that could help Mr. Demjanjuk, who is currently standing trial in Munich on separate war crimes charges.
Ms. Feigin said she was baffled by the Justice Department’s attempt to keep a central part of its history secret for so long. “It’s an amazing story,” she said, “that needs to be told.”
Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.
Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.
The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.
The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.
The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.
More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.
In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.
The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.
The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)
The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”
Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.
Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.
The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.
In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”
After the case was dismissed, radical Jewish groups urged violence against Mr. Soobzokov, and he was killed in 1985 by a bomb at his home in Paterson, N.J.
The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.
The Nazi-hunting report was the brainchild of Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer. In 1999, he persuaded Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at what he saw as a critical piece of history, and he assigned a career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job. After Mr. Richard edited the final version in 2006, he urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed, colleagues said.
When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the report’s publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died, the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.
“I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released,” Ms. Feigin said. “It broke his heart.”
After Mr. Richard’s death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the report’s release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Justice Department initially fought the lawsuit, but finally gave Mr. Sobel a partial copy — with more than 1,000 passages and references deleted based on exemptions for privacy and internal deliberations.
Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is committed to transparency, and that redactions are made by experienced lawyers.
The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.
Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.
So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.
The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.’s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.
It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.
After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengele’s scalp on privacy grounds.
Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.
A chapter on the O.S.I.’s most publicized failure — the case against John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who was mistakenly identified as Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible — deletes dozens of details, including part of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.
That section also omits a passage disclosing that Latvian émigrés sympathetic to Mr. Demjanjuk secretly arranged for the O.S.I.’s trash to be delivered to them each day from 1985 to 1987. The émigrés rifled through the garbage to find classified documents that could help Mr. Demjanjuk, who is currently standing trial in Munich on separate war crimes charges.
Ms. Feigin said she was baffled by the Justice Department’s attempt to keep a central part of its history secret for so long. “It’s an amazing story,” she said, “that needs to be told.”
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Sarah Palin's Race to the Bottom
From Politics Daily -- November 12, 2010:
Sarah Palin's Unfavorability Numbers Hit New High, Survey Finds
By CHRISTOPHER WEBER
The number of Americans viewing Sarah Palin unfavorably has hit the highest point since she burst onto the national stage over two years ago, according to a poll out Friday.
The Gallup survey conducted in the days after the Nov. 2 election found more than half of Americans -- 52 percent -- hold a negative opinion of the former Alaska governor. Only 40 percent viewed her favorably, which ties her lowest score from about a year ago.
Palin, the GOP's vice presidential candidate in 2008, is among Republican names being floated as a possible presidential pick in two years time. The poll found she might have a good chance of capturing the nomination: fully 80 percent of Republicans have a positive opinion of her.
She might have a harder time in the general election. Gallup found 81 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents viewed her unfavorably -- while fewer than four in 10 view her favorably.
Sarah Palin's Unfavorability Numbers Hit New High, Survey Finds
By CHRISTOPHER WEBER
The number of Americans viewing Sarah Palin unfavorably has hit the highest point since she burst onto the national stage over two years ago, according to a poll out Friday.
The Gallup survey conducted in the days after the Nov. 2 election found more than half of Americans -- 52 percent -- hold a negative opinion of the former Alaska governor. Only 40 percent viewed her favorably, which ties her lowest score from about a year ago.
Palin, the GOP's vice presidential candidate in 2008, is among Republican names being floated as a possible presidential pick in two years time. The poll found she might have a good chance of capturing the nomination: fully 80 percent of Republicans have a positive opinion of her.
She might have a harder time in the general election. Gallup found 81 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents viewed her unfavorably -- while fewer than four in 10 view her favorably.
Friday, November 12, 2010
How Republican John Boehner will Lead Obama and the Democrats to a Landslide Victory in 2012
From The Daily Beast -- November 12, 2010:
Obama Needs an Enemy
By Peter Beinart
The country may be down on the president. But compared to what? Wait till people get a better look at John Boehner and his band of corporate fat cats. Peter Beinart on the good news for Democrats. Plus, midterm predictions from the Election Oracle.
Amid the misery of the moment, here’s something Democrats can look forward to: President Obama is about to get his foil. He’s needed one throughout his career. In 2007, it was the contrast with Hillary Clinton that accentuated Obama’s freshness and authenticity. In 2008, it was during the presidential debates—where McCain looked erratic and uninformed and Obama looked analytical and centered—that Obama put the race away. In 2009 and 2010, by contrast, Obama has had no one to contrast himself with except for George W. Bush, and that stopped working long ago.
He’s remained, for all his troubles, far more popular than Congress. But with Congress in Democratic hands, he hasn’t been able to wield that contrast to his benefit. Instead of a political foil, Congress has provided political baggage. In passing legislation, Nancy Pelosi has proved masterful. But politically, she owns a favorability rating of 15 percent, according to this week’s New York Times, which helps explain why Republican candidates rarely utter the president’s name without mentioning hers as well.
Next week, however, things will change. A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see. Partly, that’s because congressional leaders are usually unpopular. They’re sausage-makers, practitioners of an art that most Americans despise. And they’re rarely good on TV, which is not surprising given that they’ve been elevated within their parties because of their skills behind closed doors.
A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see.
But Boehner is a particularly tough sell. Just as Pelosi, as a wealthy San Franciscan, confirmed popular stereotypes about Democrats as the party of the cultural elite, Boehner—with his coterie of golf-playing, cigar-chomping lobbyist buddies—confirms popular stereotypes about Republicans as the party of corporate fat cats. Republicans may hope that the public, having just voted overwhelmingly for their side, will be inclined to show its leaders some love. But that’s not what the polling suggests. Disapproval of Congress, according to the Times, is an amazing 76 percent, the highest figure ever recorded, which helps explain why Republicans are about to win big. But just as amazingly, the Republican Party’s approval rating is five points lower than that of the Democrats. What that means is that putting the GOP in control is unlikely to improve Americans’ opinion of the legislative branch.
Angered by the lousy economy, and eager to lash out at the people running Washington, many independent voters who backed Obama will pull the lever for the GOP. But there’s not much ideological content to their partisan shift. According to the Times poll, Americans have no more confidence that Republicans can create jobs than Democrats can. Although not wild about Obama’s health-care plan, they don’t want Congress to repeal it. And while Americans give the GOP a huge edge on cutting the budget deficit, they vehemently oppose cutting entitlements like Social Security, which is the only big conservative idea about how to actually get the deficit down.
In this economy, Obama’s never going to be wildly popular. But he doesn’t have to be; he just has to be more popular than the other guy. Starting next week, for the first time in two years, he’ll have that other guy. The first time Obama meets Speaker Boehner, expect him to smile.
Obama Needs an Enemy
By Peter Beinart
The country may be down on the president. But compared to what? Wait till people get a better look at John Boehner and his band of corporate fat cats. Peter Beinart on the good news for Democrats. Plus, midterm predictions from the Election Oracle.
Amid the misery of the moment, here’s something Democrats can look forward to: President Obama is about to get his foil. He’s needed one throughout his career. In 2007, it was the contrast with Hillary Clinton that accentuated Obama’s freshness and authenticity. In 2008, it was during the presidential debates—where McCain looked erratic and uninformed and Obama looked analytical and centered—that Obama put the race away. In 2009 and 2010, by contrast, Obama has had no one to contrast himself with except for George W. Bush, and that stopped working long ago.
He’s remained, for all his troubles, far more popular than Congress. But with Congress in Democratic hands, he hasn’t been able to wield that contrast to his benefit. Instead of a political foil, Congress has provided political baggage. In passing legislation, Nancy Pelosi has proved masterful. But politically, she owns a favorability rating of 15 percent, according to this week’s New York Times, which helps explain why Republican candidates rarely utter the president’s name without mentioning hers as well.
Next week, however, things will change. A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see. Partly, that’s because congressional leaders are usually unpopular. They’re sausage-makers, practitioners of an art that most Americans despise. And they’re rarely good on TV, which is not surprising given that they’ve been elevated within their parties because of their skills behind closed doors.
A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see.
But Boehner is a particularly tough sell. Just as Pelosi, as a wealthy San Franciscan, confirmed popular stereotypes about Democrats as the party of the cultural elite, Boehner—with his coterie of golf-playing, cigar-chomping lobbyist buddies—confirms popular stereotypes about Republicans as the party of corporate fat cats. Republicans may hope that the public, having just voted overwhelmingly for their side, will be inclined to show its leaders some love. But that’s not what the polling suggests. Disapproval of Congress, according to the Times, is an amazing 76 percent, the highest figure ever recorded, which helps explain why Republicans are about to win big. But just as amazingly, the Republican Party’s approval rating is five points lower than that of the Democrats. What that means is that putting the GOP in control is unlikely to improve Americans’ opinion of the legislative branch.
Angered by the lousy economy, and eager to lash out at the people running Washington, many independent voters who backed Obama will pull the lever for the GOP. But there’s not much ideological content to their partisan shift. According to the Times poll, Americans have no more confidence that Republicans can create jobs than Democrats can. Although not wild about Obama’s health-care plan, they don’t want Congress to repeal it. And while Americans give the GOP a huge edge on cutting the budget deficit, they vehemently oppose cutting entitlements like Social Security, which is the only big conservative idea about how to actually get the deficit down.
In this economy, Obama’s never going to be wildly popular. But he doesn’t have to be; he just has to be more popular than the other guy. Starting next week, for the first time in two years, he’ll have that other guy. The first time Obama meets Speaker Boehner, expect him to smile.
Glenn Beck Brings Anti-Semitism and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to American TV Viewers on Fox News
From The Daily Beast -- November 12, 2010:
Glenn Beck's Anti-Semitic Attacks
by Michelle Goldberg
The Fox host’s stunning two-day tirade against George Soros is a new low on American television.
Anti-Semitism, like all ideologies, tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain. In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause.
Nazi propaganda called Jews drahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.
If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.
“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America's status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn't believe in God, but that's perhaps because he thinks he is.”
Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”
Beck went beyond demonizing Soros; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”
Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.
To inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Beck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt guilty about it, he said no, because he wasn’t at fault. The slander that he was a Nazi collaborator has proliferated on the right ever since.
It’s entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance. Early on Wednesday’s show, Beck cited the “Prime Minister of Malaysia” on Soros’ villainy. As Media Matters pointed out, he was almost certainly talking about former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mohamad also said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”
“There’s a difference between first-degree murder and vehicular homicide, which is intentionality,” says J.J. Goldberg, a columnist and former editor in chief of The Forward, America’s leading Jewish newspaper. Goldberg wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as “as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.”
On Thursday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to combat anti-Semitism, finally condemned Beck. Earlier, I’d criticized the group for its silence, a change that Todd Gutnick, the ADL’s director of media relations, fiercely disputed.
“Sometimes the ADL likes to consider what it’s going to say before it says it,” he said. “In this case, we wanted to see the totality of what he was doing on the air before speaking out.”
In a statement, Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor himself, expressed outrage over Beck’s charges about Soros’ behavior as a boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary, which Beck made on television on Tuesday and again on the radio Wednesday. “Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” said Foxman. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific… To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”
Glenn Beck's Anti-Semitic Attacks
by Michelle Goldberg
The Fox host’s stunning two-day tirade against George Soros is a new low on American television.
Anti-Semitism, like all ideologies, tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain. In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause.
Nazi propaganda called Jews drahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.
If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.
“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America's status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn't believe in God, but that's perhaps because he thinks he is.”
Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”
Beck went beyond demonizing Soros; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”
Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.
To inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Beck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt guilty about it, he said no, because he wasn’t at fault. The slander that he was a Nazi collaborator has proliferated on the right ever since.
It’s entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance. Early on Wednesday’s show, Beck cited the “Prime Minister of Malaysia” on Soros’ villainy. As Media Matters pointed out, he was almost certainly talking about former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mohamad also said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”
“There’s a difference between first-degree murder and vehicular homicide, which is intentionality,” says J.J. Goldberg, a columnist and former editor in chief of The Forward, America’s leading Jewish newspaper. Goldberg wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as “as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.”
On Thursday morning, the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to combat anti-Semitism, finally condemned Beck. Earlier, I’d criticized the group for its silence, a change that Todd Gutnick, the ADL’s director of media relations, fiercely disputed.
“Sometimes the ADL likes to consider what it’s going to say before it says it,” he said. “In this case, we wanted to see the totality of what he was doing on the air before speaking out.”
In a statement, Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor himself, expressed outrage over Beck’s charges about Soros’ behavior as a boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary, which Beck made on television on Tuesday and again on the radio Wednesday. “Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” said Foxman. “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say—inaccurately—that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific… To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”
Will Obama and the Democrats Ever Fight Back --- Where Is "Give 'Em Hell, Harry"?
From The Washington Post -- November 12, 2010:
Where's the Democrats' Fighting Spirit?
By Eugene Robinson
"Why don't they fight back?"
That's the question I've been hearing from the Democratic Party's stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I've been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don't stand up for what they say they believe.
I confess that I don't have a good answer. What I can say with confidence, however, is that the White House and Democrats in Congress ignore these grumblings at their peril. Call it polarization, call it conviction, call it whatever you like: These are not wishy-washy times. If you don't stand for something, you get run over.
We saw this principle in action last week. Anomie among the Democratic base was not the main reason the party suffered what Obama called a "shellacking" in the midterms, but clearly it was a factor. Elements of the party's traditional coalition - minorities, women, young people - voted in much smaller numbers than they did in 2008. The "enthusiasm gap" turned out to be real, and it had real consequences.
I've been hearing frustration at the willingness of Democrats to accommodate a Republican Party that refuses to give an inch. To progressives who may not understand the subtleties of inside-the-Beltway thinking, this looks like surrender.
Wednesday night, I gave a talk at Indiana State University. "You watch," said a man in the audience, "the Democrats are going to cave on the tax cuts for the rich, just like they caved on everything else."
Sure enough, on Thursday I awoke to read the Huffington Post's interview with White House senior adviser David Axelrod, in which he appeared to signal that Obama - with great reluctance - might have to accept an extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans after all. Otherwise, Republicans would continue to block the Democrats' preferred course of action, which is to extend the full tax cuts only for those making less than $250,000 a year.
Axelrod later denied that the White House is giving in. I hope that's the case, but his words didn't exactly convey flinty resolve.
Let's examine this issue a little more closely. Making the tax cuts permanent for the wealthy would increase the deficit by $700 billion over the next decade. Which party claims to be urgently, desperately concerned about the deficit? The Republicans, of course. So which party is prepared to bust the budget, if that's what it takes, to serve the interests of the rich? The GOP. And which party, to get its way, refuses to approve desperately needed tax relief for the bruised and battered middle class? Once again, the Republicans.
Now, which party holds the presidency and, until January, ample majorities in both houses of Congress? That would be the Democrats. Which party can point to public opinion polls indicating that Americans support its position that the Bush tax cuts should be extended only for the middle class? That, too, would be the Democrats. And finally, which party somehow appears to be looking for a way to lose this argument and capitulate? Incredibly, the Democrats.
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that those who say the lesson from last week's drubbing is that progressives should get a spine simply "don't get it." The explanation given by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some others - that aside from stubbornly high unemployment, one contributing factor was the Democrats' failure to explain their program and counter Republican misinformation - is seen by the conventionally wise as delusional.
But I've been meeting an awful lot of progressives around the country who share that delusion, if that's what it is. They despair that their neighbors don't know that it was George W. Bush who proposed the TARP bailout, not Obama - or that it worked, or that taxpayers are getting their money back. They wonder how health-care reform came to be defined not as a moral issue or a way to slow rising costs, which it is, but as a "big government takeover," complete with "death panels." Which it isn't.
What I'm hearing is frustration, and it's getting louder. I'm hearing the view that the Obama administration, which has done much good, can do better - by speaking clearly, standing its ground - and, when pushed by bullies, shoving back.
Where's the Democrats' Fighting Spirit?
By Eugene Robinson
"Why don't they fight back?"
That's the question I've been hearing from the Democratic Party's stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I've been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don't stand up for what they say they believe.
I confess that I don't have a good answer. What I can say with confidence, however, is that the White House and Democrats in Congress ignore these grumblings at their peril. Call it polarization, call it conviction, call it whatever you like: These are not wishy-washy times. If you don't stand for something, you get run over.
We saw this principle in action last week. Anomie among the Democratic base was not the main reason the party suffered what Obama called a "shellacking" in the midterms, but clearly it was a factor. Elements of the party's traditional coalition - minorities, women, young people - voted in much smaller numbers than they did in 2008. The "enthusiasm gap" turned out to be real, and it had real consequences.
I've been hearing frustration at the willingness of Democrats to accommodate a Republican Party that refuses to give an inch. To progressives who may not understand the subtleties of inside-the-Beltway thinking, this looks like surrender.
Wednesday night, I gave a talk at Indiana State University. "You watch," said a man in the audience, "the Democrats are going to cave on the tax cuts for the rich, just like they caved on everything else."
Sure enough, on Thursday I awoke to read the Huffington Post's interview with White House senior adviser David Axelrod, in which he appeared to signal that Obama - with great reluctance - might have to accept an extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans after all. Otherwise, Republicans would continue to block the Democrats' preferred course of action, which is to extend the full tax cuts only for those making less than $250,000 a year.
Axelrod later denied that the White House is giving in. I hope that's the case, but his words didn't exactly convey flinty resolve.
Let's examine this issue a little more closely. Making the tax cuts permanent for the wealthy would increase the deficit by $700 billion over the next decade. Which party claims to be urgently, desperately concerned about the deficit? The Republicans, of course. So which party is prepared to bust the budget, if that's what it takes, to serve the interests of the rich? The GOP. And which party, to get its way, refuses to approve desperately needed tax relief for the bruised and battered middle class? Once again, the Republicans.
Now, which party holds the presidency and, until January, ample majorities in both houses of Congress? That would be the Democrats. Which party can point to public opinion polls indicating that Americans support its position that the Bush tax cuts should be extended only for the middle class? That, too, would be the Democrats. And finally, which party somehow appears to be looking for a way to lose this argument and capitulate? Incredibly, the Democrats.
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that those who say the lesson from last week's drubbing is that progressives should get a spine simply "don't get it." The explanation given by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some others - that aside from stubbornly high unemployment, one contributing factor was the Democrats' failure to explain their program and counter Republican misinformation - is seen by the conventionally wise as delusional.
But I've been meeting an awful lot of progressives around the country who share that delusion, if that's what it is. They despair that their neighbors don't know that it was George W. Bush who proposed the TARP bailout, not Obama - or that it worked, or that taxpayers are getting their money back. They wonder how health-care reform came to be defined not as a moral issue or a way to slow rising costs, which it is, but as a "big government takeover," complete with "death panels." Which it isn't.
What I'm hearing is frustration, and it's getting louder. I'm hearing the view that the Obama administration, which has done much good, can do better - by speaking clearly, standing its ground - and, when pushed by bullies, shoving back.
Why President Obama Is Right About India
From The Washington Post -- November 12, 2010:
Why President Obama is Right About India
By Charles Krauthammer
Much grousing about the expense of President Obama's India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him. Especially when his first stop is Mumbai, scene of one of the most savage and sustained terror attacks in modern times.
It is protested that Britain's prime minister took a British Air flight when he traveled here in July. So what? To be blunt about it: A once-imperial middle power flies commercial; America flies colossal. Why do you think we built that 747 flying palace emblazoned with the presidential insignia - if not to land to awestruck crowds wherever it goes?
There was grumbling about the White House taking over every room at Mumbai's five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel. What is the Secret Service to do? Allow suites to be let to, say, groups of Pakistani madrassa instructors?
I will admit that Indian authorities went somewhat overboard when they cut down the coconuts surrounding the Gandhi museum in Mumbai. I am no expert on this, having never been subject to a coconut attack, but it seems to me that a freefalling coconut is no match for an armored car built to withstand anything short of a small nuclear device. Now perhaps the enemy, always racing one step ahead of us, is working on the dreaded RPC - the rocket-propelled coconut. I'm not privy to all the intelligence here, and, try as I may, I could get nothing out of the Coconut Desk at CIA. Nonetheless, to this outsider, the anti-coconut measures seemed a bit excessive.
But I digress. The only alternative to drawing down the Treasury to move the president around safely is for him not to go at all. And that's not an alternative. Presidential visits are the highest form of diplomacy, and the symbolism alone carries enormous weight. No one remembers what Nixon did in China; what changed the world is that Nixon went to China.
The India visit was particularly necessary in light of Obama's bumbling overenthusiasm in his 2009 trip to China in which he lavished much time, energy and praise upon his hosts and then oddly tried to elevate Beijing to a G-2 partnership, a kind of two-nation world condominium. Worse, however, was Obama suggesting a Chinese role in South Asia - an affront to India's autonomy and regional dominance, and a signal of U.S. acquiescence to Chinese hegemony.
This hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago - a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe's attempt to manage Germany's rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China's expansion.
Nor is this some far-off concern. China's aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan can no longer sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed a rare-earth mineral embargo. Japan capitulated.
That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China's neighbors from South Korea all the way around to India are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.
And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It's not just our inherent affinities - being democratic, English-speaking, free-market and dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China.
Which is why Obama's dramatic call for India to be elevated to permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council was so important. However useless and obsolete the United Nations, a Security Council seat carries totemic significance. It elevates India, while helping bind it to us as our most strategic and organic Third World ally.
China is no enemy, but it remains troublingly adversarial. Which is why India must be the center of our Asian diplomacy. And why Obama's trip - coconuts and all - was worth every penny.
Why President Obama is Right About India
By Charles Krauthammer
Much grousing about the expense of President Obama's India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him. Especially when his first stop is Mumbai, scene of one of the most savage and sustained terror attacks in modern times.
It is protested that Britain's prime minister took a British Air flight when he traveled here in July. So what? To be blunt about it: A once-imperial middle power flies commercial; America flies colossal. Why do you think we built that 747 flying palace emblazoned with the presidential insignia - if not to land to awestruck crowds wherever it goes?
There was grumbling about the White House taking over every room at Mumbai's five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel. What is the Secret Service to do? Allow suites to be let to, say, groups of Pakistani madrassa instructors?
I will admit that Indian authorities went somewhat overboard when they cut down the coconuts surrounding the Gandhi museum in Mumbai. I am no expert on this, having never been subject to a coconut attack, but it seems to me that a freefalling coconut is no match for an armored car built to withstand anything short of a small nuclear device. Now perhaps the enemy, always racing one step ahead of us, is working on the dreaded RPC - the rocket-propelled coconut. I'm not privy to all the intelligence here, and, try as I may, I could get nothing out of the Coconut Desk at CIA. Nonetheless, to this outsider, the anti-coconut measures seemed a bit excessive.
But I digress. The only alternative to drawing down the Treasury to move the president around safely is for him not to go at all. And that's not an alternative. Presidential visits are the highest form of diplomacy, and the symbolism alone carries enormous weight. No one remembers what Nixon did in China; what changed the world is that Nixon went to China.
The India visit was particularly necessary in light of Obama's bumbling overenthusiasm in his 2009 trip to China in which he lavished much time, energy and praise upon his hosts and then oddly tried to elevate Beijing to a G-2 partnership, a kind of two-nation world condominium. Worse, however, was Obama suggesting a Chinese role in South Asia - an affront to India's autonomy and regional dominance, and a signal of U.S. acquiescence to Chinese hegemony.
This hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago - a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe's attempt to manage Germany's rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China's expansion.
Nor is this some far-off concern. China's aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan can no longer sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed a rare-earth mineral embargo. Japan capitulated.
That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China's neighbors from South Korea all the way around to India are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.
And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It's not just our inherent affinities - being democratic, English-speaking, free-market and dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China.
Which is why Obama's dramatic call for India to be elevated to permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council was so important. However useless and obsolete the United Nations, a Security Council seat carries totemic significance. It elevates India, while helping bind it to us as our most strategic and organic Third World ally.
China is no enemy, but it remains troublingly adversarial. Which is why India must be the center of our Asian diplomacy. And why Obama's trip - coconuts and all - was worth every penny.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Can Democrats Fight for their Principles or Will They Simply Roll Over and Die?
From The Washington Post -- November 11, 2010:
Democrats Should Hold Their Ground
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
In 2008, the largest number of voters in American history gave the Democrats their largest share of the presidential vote in 44 years and big majorities in the House and Senate.
How did Republicans react? They held their ideological ground, refused to give an inch to the new president and insisted that persistent opposition would eventually yield them victory. On Nov. 2, it did.
Yet now that Democrats have suffered a setback - in an election, it should be said, involving many fewer voters than the big battle two years ago - they are being counseled to do the opposite of what the Republicans did, especially by Republicans.
Democrats who stand up to say they were right to reform health care and stimulate a staggering economy are told they "don't get it" and are "in denial." Liberals who refuse to let one election loss alter their commitments are dismissed as "doubling down" on a bad bet.
President Obama made the word "audacity" popular, but conservative Republicans practice it.
Mainstream commentary typically bends to the more audacious side. As a result, there was far less middle-of-the-road advice in 2008 urging Republicans to move to the center than there were warnings to Obama not to read too much into his victory. The United States, we were told, was still a "center-right" country. The actual election result didn't seem to matter back then.
Funny that when progressives win, they are told to moderate their hopes, but when conservatives win, progressives are told to retreat.
Worse, Democrats tend to internalize the views of their opponents. Already, some moderate Democrats are claiming that all would have been well if Obama had not tried to reform health care or "overreached" in other ways. Never mind that Obama's biggest single mistake (beyond the administration's projection that unemployment would peak around 8 percent) was giving in to Senate moderates and not demanding the much bigger stimulus plan a weak economy plainly needed.
In fact, moderate Democrats would do better calling attention to how extreme and out of touch the conservative program actually is. Moderates should be more offended than anyone that the GOP's ideological obsessions (health-care repeal, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation) have little connection to solving the country's problems, particularly the economic difficulties in the electorally pivotal Midwest.
The best news for Democrats is that the Republicans' fixation on repealing the health-care law will give its supporters a 10th inning - an unexpected second chance to win the struggle for public opinion.
The most politically potent attack on the health-care effort was not on the plan itself. It was the argument that Democrats should have spent less time on this bill and more on job creation. Every moment the Republicans devote to destroying this year's reform opens them up to exactly the same criticism.
Moreover, reopening the health-care debate will allow the law's supporters to defend its particulars. What, exactly, do the Republicans want to repeal? Tax breaks helping businesses cover their employees? Individual tax credits? (Yes, repealing the health bill would be a big tax increase.) Protections for people with pre-existing conditions or for adult children under age 26?
Republicans are also showing who and what they really care about by their other big priority: making sure the Bush tax cuts are extended for the wealthy in the coming lame-duck congressional session that Democrats will still control.
Even in this year's very conservative electorate, only 18 percent said cutting taxes should be the next Congress's highest priority. Only 40 percent said the Bush tax cuts should be extended for all, including the wealthy; 51 percent were opposed to this, including 36 percent who favored extending them only to those earning under $250,000 a year (Obama's position), and 15 percent who opposed extending them at all.
Yes, the moderate, middle-of-the-road position is the one held by the president. Why sell it out? Raising the $250,000 ceiling a bit might be called a compromise. Any wholesale extension would be a shameful and abject capitulation that would just prove how easy it is to bully Democrats.
Give Republicans credit for this: They don't chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser's game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?
Democrats Should Hold Their Ground
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
In 2008, the largest number of voters in American history gave the Democrats their largest share of the presidential vote in 44 years and big majorities in the House and Senate.
How did Republicans react? They held their ideological ground, refused to give an inch to the new president and insisted that persistent opposition would eventually yield them victory. On Nov. 2, it did.
Yet now that Democrats have suffered a setback - in an election, it should be said, involving many fewer voters than the big battle two years ago - they are being counseled to do the opposite of what the Republicans did, especially by Republicans.
Democrats who stand up to say they were right to reform health care and stimulate a staggering economy are told they "don't get it" and are "in denial." Liberals who refuse to let one election loss alter their commitments are dismissed as "doubling down" on a bad bet.
President Obama made the word "audacity" popular, but conservative Republicans practice it.
Mainstream commentary typically bends to the more audacious side. As a result, there was far less middle-of-the-road advice in 2008 urging Republicans to move to the center than there were warnings to Obama not to read too much into his victory. The United States, we were told, was still a "center-right" country. The actual election result didn't seem to matter back then.
Funny that when progressives win, they are told to moderate their hopes, but when conservatives win, progressives are told to retreat.
Worse, Democrats tend to internalize the views of their opponents. Already, some moderate Democrats are claiming that all would have been well if Obama had not tried to reform health care or "overreached" in other ways. Never mind that Obama's biggest single mistake (beyond the administration's projection that unemployment would peak around 8 percent) was giving in to Senate moderates and not demanding the much bigger stimulus plan a weak economy plainly needed.
In fact, moderate Democrats would do better calling attention to how extreme and out of touch the conservative program actually is. Moderates should be more offended than anyone that the GOP's ideological obsessions (health-care repeal, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation) have little connection to solving the country's problems, particularly the economic difficulties in the electorally pivotal Midwest.
The best news for Democrats is that the Republicans' fixation on repealing the health-care law will give its supporters a 10th inning - an unexpected second chance to win the struggle for public opinion.
The most politically potent attack on the health-care effort was not on the plan itself. It was the argument that Democrats should have spent less time on this bill and more on job creation. Every moment the Republicans devote to destroying this year's reform opens them up to exactly the same criticism.
Moreover, reopening the health-care debate will allow the law's supporters to defend its particulars. What, exactly, do the Republicans want to repeal? Tax breaks helping businesses cover their employees? Individual tax credits? (Yes, repealing the health bill would be a big tax increase.) Protections for people with pre-existing conditions or for adult children under age 26?
Republicans are also showing who and what they really care about by their other big priority: making sure the Bush tax cuts are extended for the wealthy in the coming lame-duck congressional session that Democrats will still control.
Even in this year's very conservative electorate, only 18 percent said cutting taxes should be the next Congress's highest priority. Only 40 percent said the Bush tax cuts should be extended for all, including the wealthy; 51 percent were opposed to this, including 36 percent who favored extending them only to those earning under $250,000 a year (Obama's position), and 15 percent who opposed extending them at all.
Yes, the moderate, middle-of-the-road position is the one held by the president. Why sell it out? Raising the $250,000 ceiling a bit might be called a compromise. Any wholesale extension would be a shameful and abject capitulation that would just prove how easy it is to bully Democrats.
Give Republicans credit for this: They don't chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser's game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?
Was George W. Bush a "Socialist", Too?
From The Washington Post -- November 10, 2010:
Nostalgic for George W. Bush
By Dana Milbank
I miss George W. Bush.
I don't miss him in the sense that I wish he were still president. If he were, we might be at war with Iran and North Korea by now, and perhaps Portugal. Neither do I miss the endless debates over waterboarding and the Iraq war - bad memories that have returned to the news as Bush has re-emerged into public view this week to launch his book.
Rather, I miss him because in the end he was willing to toss aside his ideological orthodoxy when the national interest required it - a trait conspicuously absent among his fellow conservatives these last two years.
It was the final chapter of Bush's presidency, and is correspondingly the final chapter of his memoir, "Decision Points." As Bush describes it, he had just been told by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that they should spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to buy up mortgage assets, and he approved the plan in full. "If we're really looking at another Great Depression," he recalls saying, "you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover."
By Tea Party doctrine, that's heresy. But Bush, in "Decision Points," doesn't back off at all from his defense of the auto industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies - even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party.
"The strategy was a breathtaking intervention in the free market," he writes of the TARP bank-bailout program. "It flew against all my instincts. But it was necessary to pull the country out of the panic. I decided that the only way to preserve the free market in the long run was to intervene in the short run."
In an extended book-launch interview with Bush, NBC anchor Matt Lauer referred to a Pew Research Center poll that found nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent know it originated under Bush.
"Oh, yeah?" Bush replied. "Fifty percent of the people were wrong." He defended his rationale for supporting TARP: "Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? . . . Or do you take taxpayers' money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter."
Neither did Bush shy from his position when interviewed Tuesday by Rush Limbaugh. "If you had it to do over, would you do the TARP bailout?"
"Yeah, I would have," Bush told Limbaugh. "I didn't like it at all, but when you're president you get faced with stark choices, and I couldn't have lived with myself had the country gone into a deep depression, and people's lives would have been affected."
Limbaugh, declining to challenge Bush on this, changed the subject to Democratic culpability for the subprime-mortgage disaster.
Bush resumed his defense of his interventionist economic policies Wednesday, when he sat down with Lauer for another interview, this time on the "Today" show. "The lesson there is that I had to set aside an ideology," he said.
Setting aside ideology? Those are fightin' words in Washington now.
Bush was fiercely ideological, too, but in this instance he felt the competing pull of responsibility. "I felt like the captain of a sinking ship," he writes in the memoir, adding: "This was one ugly way to end a presidency."
Even then, the ideologues were opposed. Bush quotes "one Republican senator" - Jim Bunning of Kentucky - as saying the TARP program would "take away the free market and institute socialism in America." He recalls his own party's efforts to defeat TARP, and a public letter written by Grover Norquist saying only "Dear President Bush: No."
Bush acknowledges that he undertook "the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt," but he says it "helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions." He defends the "automakers' rescue" with federal loans: "I had to safeguard American workers and families from a widespread collapse." He admits that the AIG bailout was "basically a nationalization of America's largest insurance company." But, he adds, "that was a hell of a lot better than a financial collapse."
In one of his few pieces of advice for those who remain in Washington, Bush recommends that "Congress should not infringe on the Federal Reserve's independence in conducting monetary policy."
As Sarah Palin and other conservatives lash out at the Fed this week, it's another reason to pine for Bush.
Nostalgic for George W. Bush
By Dana Milbank
I miss George W. Bush.
I don't miss him in the sense that I wish he were still president. If he were, we might be at war with Iran and North Korea by now, and perhaps Portugal. Neither do I miss the endless debates over waterboarding and the Iraq war - bad memories that have returned to the news as Bush has re-emerged into public view this week to launch his book.
Rather, I miss him because in the end he was willing to toss aside his ideological orthodoxy when the national interest required it - a trait conspicuously absent among his fellow conservatives these last two years.
It was the final chapter of Bush's presidency, and is correspondingly the final chapter of his memoir, "Decision Points." As Bush describes it, he had just been told by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that they should spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to buy up mortgage assets, and he approved the plan in full. "If we're really looking at another Great Depression," he recalls saying, "you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover."
By Tea Party doctrine, that's heresy. But Bush, in "Decision Points," doesn't back off at all from his defense of the auto industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies - even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party.
"The strategy was a breathtaking intervention in the free market," he writes of the TARP bank-bailout program. "It flew against all my instincts. But it was necessary to pull the country out of the panic. I decided that the only way to preserve the free market in the long run was to intervene in the short run."
In an extended book-launch interview with Bush, NBC anchor Matt Lauer referred to a Pew Research Center poll that found nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent know it originated under Bush.
"Oh, yeah?" Bush replied. "Fifty percent of the people were wrong." He defended his rationale for supporting TARP: "Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? . . . Or do you take taxpayers' money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter."
Neither did Bush shy from his position when interviewed Tuesday by Rush Limbaugh. "If you had it to do over, would you do the TARP bailout?"
"Yeah, I would have," Bush told Limbaugh. "I didn't like it at all, but when you're president you get faced with stark choices, and I couldn't have lived with myself had the country gone into a deep depression, and people's lives would have been affected."
Limbaugh, declining to challenge Bush on this, changed the subject to Democratic culpability for the subprime-mortgage disaster.
Bush resumed his defense of his interventionist economic policies Wednesday, when he sat down with Lauer for another interview, this time on the "Today" show. "The lesson there is that I had to set aside an ideology," he said.
Setting aside ideology? Those are fightin' words in Washington now.
Bush was fiercely ideological, too, but in this instance he felt the competing pull of responsibility. "I felt like the captain of a sinking ship," he writes in the memoir, adding: "This was one ugly way to end a presidency."
Even then, the ideologues were opposed. Bush quotes "one Republican senator" - Jim Bunning of Kentucky - as saying the TARP program would "take away the free market and institute socialism in America." He recalls his own party's efforts to defeat TARP, and a public letter written by Grover Norquist saying only "Dear President Bush: No."
Bush acknowledges that he undertook "the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt," but he says it "helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions." He defends the "automakers' rescue" with federal loans: "I had to safeguard American workers and families from a widespread collapse." He admits that the AIG bailout was "basically a nationalization of America's largest insurance company." But, he adds, "that was a hell of a lot better than a financial collapse."
In one of his few pieces of advice for those who remain in Washington, Bush recommends that "Congress should not infringe on the Federal Reserve's independence in conducting monetary policy."
As Sarah Palin and other conservatives lash out at the Fed this week, it's another reason to pine for Bush.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Is America Heading for Fascism?
From Common Dreams -- November 8, 2010:
A Recipe for Fascism
by Chris Hedges
American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.
More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as "mainstream Americans" now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.
All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money-hundreds of billions of dollars-is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.
The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.
Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.
The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum. Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.
The "inevitability" of globalization has permitted huge pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged to the government. As John Ralston Saul in "The Collapse of Globalization" points out, "the role of charity should be to fill the cracks of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good hasn't yet focused or can't. Dealing with poverty is the basic responsibility of the state." But the state no longer has the interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target slated for elimination is Social Security.
That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalization-from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas Friedman-do for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalization's empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.
We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale, of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Wal-Mart's gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater than those of most small nation-states. The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers, however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.
The old left-the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses-would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.
We believe, like the Spaniards in the 16th century who pillaged Latin America for gold and silver, that money, usually the product of making and trading goods, is real. The Spanish empire, once the money ran out and it no longer produced anything worth buying, went up in smoke. Today's use in the United States of some $12 trillion in government funds to refinance our class of speculators is a similar form of self-deception. Money markets are still treated, despite the collapse of the global economy, as a legitimate source of trade and wealth creation. The destructive power of financial bubbles, as well as the danger of an unchecked elite, was discovered in ancient Athens and detailed more than a century ago in Emile Zola's novel "Money." But we seem determined to find out this self-destructive force for ourselves. And when the second collapse comes, as come it must, we will revisit wrenching economic and political tragedies forgotten in the mists of history.
A Recipe for Fascism
by Chris Hedges
American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.
More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as "mainstream Americans" now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.
All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money-hundreds of billions of dollars-is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.
The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.
Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.
The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum. Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.
The "inevitability" of globalization has permitted huge pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged to the government. As John Ralston Saul in "The Collapse of Globalization" points out, "the role of charity should be to fill the cracks of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good hasn't yet focused or can't. Dealing with poverty is the basic responsibility of the state." But the state no longer has the interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target slated for elimination is Social Security.
That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalization-from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas Friedman-do for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalization's empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.
We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale, of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Wal-Mart's gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater than those of most small nation-states. The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers, however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.
The old left-the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses-would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.
We believe, like the Spaniards in the 16th century who pillaged Latin America for gold and silver, that money, usually the product of making and trading goods, is real. The Spanish empire, once the money ran out and it no longer produced anything worth buying, went up in smoke. Today's use in the United States of some $12 trillion in government funds to refinance our class of speculators is a similar form of self-deception. Money markets are still treated, despite the collapse of the global economy, as a legitimate source of trade and wealth creation. The destructive power of financial bubbles, as well as the danger of an unchecked elite, was discovered in ancient Athens and detailed more than a century ago in Emile Zola's novel "Money." But we seem determined to find out this self-destructive force for ourselves. And when the second collapse comes, as come it must, we will revisit wrenching economic and political tragedies forgotten in the mists of history.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Is the USA a Banana Republic?
From The New York Times -- November 6, 2010:
Our Banana Republic
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.
But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.
At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.
Likewise, an obvious priority in the worst economic downturn in 70 years should be to extend unemployment insurance benefits, some of which will be curtailed soon unless Congress renews them. Or there’s the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which helps train and support workers who have lost their jobs because of foreign trade. It will no longer apply to service workers after Jan. 1, unless Congress intervenes.
So we face a choice. Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?
And if Republicans are worried about long-term budget deficits, a reasonable concern, why are they insistent on two steps that nonpartisan economists say would worsen the deficits by more than $800 billion over a decade — cutting taxes for the most opulent, and repealing health care reform? What other programs would they cut to make up the lost $800 billion in revenue?
In weighing these issues, let’s remember that backdrop of America’s rising inequality.
In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But there’s evidence that the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.
Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.
Here’s their explanation: When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely.
Another consequence the scholars found: Rising inequality also led to more divorces, presumably a byproduct of the strains of financial distress. Maybe I’m overly sentimental or romantic, but that pierces me. It’s a reminder that inequality isn’t just an economic issue but also a question of human dignity and happiness.
Mounting evidence suggests that losing a job or a home can rock our identity and savage our self-esteem. Forced moves wrench families from their schools and support networks.
In short, inequality leaves people on the lower rungs feeling like hamsters on a wheel spinning ever faster, without hope or escape.
Economic polarization also shatters our sense of national union and common purpose, fostering political polarization as well.
So in this postelection landscape, let’s not aggravate income gaps that already would make a Latin American caudillo proud. To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.
Our Banana Republic
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.
But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.
At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.
Likewise, an obvious priority in the worst economic downturn in 70 years should be to extend unemployment insurance benefits, some of which will be curtailed soon unless Congress renews them. Or there’s the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which helps train and support workers who have lost their jobs because of foreign trade. It will no longer apply to service workers after Jan. 1, unless Congress intervenes.
So we face a choice. Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?
And if Republicans are worried about long-term budget deficits, a reasonable concern, why are they insistent on two steps that nonpartisan economists say would worsen the deficits by more than $800 billion over a decade — cutting taxes for the most opulent, and repealing health care reform? What other programs would they cut to make up the lost $800 billion in revenue?
In weighing these issues, let’s remember that backdrop of America’s rising inequality.
In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But there’s evidence that the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.
Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.
Here’s their explanation: When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely.
Another consequence the scholars found: Rising inequality also led to more divorces, presumably a byproduct of the strains of financial distress. Maybe I’m overly sentimental or romantic, but that pierces me. It’s a reminder that inequality isn’t just an economic issue but also a question of human dignity and happiness.
Mounting evidence suggests that losing a job or a home can rock our identity and savage our self-esteem. Forced moves wrench families from their schools and support networks.
In short, inequality leaves people on the lower rungs feeling like hamsters on a wheel spinning ever faster, without hope or escape.
Economic polarization also shatters our sense of national union and common purpose, fostering political polarization as well.
So in this postelection landscape, let’s not aggravate income gaps that already would make a Latin American caudillo proud. To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
The Republican Big Lie
From The Daily Beast -- November 2, 2010:
The Republican Big Lie -- The Stimulus Worked
By Sir Harold Evans
The expected Republican victory on Tuesday will be built on an untruth: that President Obama’s stimulus didn’t work. Sir Harold Evans sets the record straight.
Millions will go to the polls tomorrow deceived by a brilliant propaganda campaign. They may have many reasons to vote against the Obama administration. Many of the criticisms may be justified, many not. Take your pick.
I am concerned only with one. I call it The Big Lie because its acceptance has had a big impact on all our lives and it will continue to have a big impact, like a malign virus that one ingests wreaks progressive damage.
The Big Lie is that the aggressive fiscal and monetary measures by which Obama defended America in the Great Recession were a waste of money, a notorious example of the Democratic appetite for throwing money at any problem.
The summary charge is that “the stimulus did not work.” It has been propagated in a blizzard of television ads, in the slogans of Tea Party rallies, in countless vehement blogs and in print. Mostly this has been argument by assertion, even from such a distinguished writer as George Will. There has been precious little analysis of what effect the money had, and barely any reporting of what serious analysis there has been.
CNN made a valiant effort early on and then seems to have gotten bored–or should we say gored by ratings–and two authoritative reports have been published (I will come to them), but they have been washed over, flotsam on the tide of ignorance. Even this bright Monday morning, the New York Post publishes a Big Lie article by Stephen M. Meister, a partner in the law firm of Meister, Seelig and Fein LLP who writes that from the stimulus “none of the jobs showed up.”
The Obama administration made a tactical error in trying to be precise. It estimated that the stimulus spending would keep unemployment to 8 percent or less. But the commonplace assertion and the widespread notion that no jobs have resulted from the program is off by an order of magnitude that if made in business would instantly bankrupt millions of going concerns.
Beware the GOP Coronation -- Contractors, subcontractors and other recipients of stimulus monies were required by law to document each calendar quarter the number of jobs funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Just to take the second quarter of this year, the number certified is 750,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Extrapolating from receipts already in by using reliable mathematical models, the number of men and women put back to work just in the second quarter of 2010 is at least 1.4 million!
These numbers are contained in a report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Let’s be nice to most of the people saying the stimulus had no effect and presume they never got round to reading the CBO report. That is probably a fair assumption, or otherwise the population of the United States would have an extraordinary number of people with noses as long as the Golden Gate Bridge. But the Republican leaders in Congress could be expected to read Congressional documents they speak about–couldn’t they? They have no excuse for their Big Lie sold time and again to the gullible masses.
Maybe the Congressional liars will come back to say they don’t believe their own budget office, which would be ironical because it would involve them refusing to believe that the same office’s estimate of our deficit is much exaggerated.
But come away from the once-hallowed halls of Congress. The serial retailers of the Big Lie should read the careful econometric report by two independent and distinguished economists, the former Deputy Chairman of the Fed, Alan S. Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton University, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.
Blinder and Zandi examined the effect of TARP and the stimulus using Moody’s Analytical Model of the US economy. They reported, “We find the effects on real GDP, jobs and inflation are huge and probably averted what could have been called The Great Depression 2.0.”
“Without the government response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5 percent lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8.5 million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.”
It is a tragedy, since if we are to have more refusal to face the effects of the stimulus, as now seems likely, life is going to get a lot more miserable for millions.
They attribute the larger part of this wholly benign result to have been from saving the financial system–something begun under President Bush and completed under Obama. Nonetheless, the effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising real GDP by about 3.4 percent, holding the unemployment rate about one-and-a-half percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls.
The Big Lie is a disgrace to all who have uttered it, knowingly or unknowingly. It is worse. It is a tragedy, since if we are to have more refusal to face the effects of the stimulus, as now seems likely, life is going to get a lot more miserable for millions after one of the worst elections I’ve ever seen in many years of reporting.
We were like a man a sinking in a swamp. A good neighbor rushed along and threw us a rope. It just about stopped us sinking. But it didn’t get us out. It was too short, just as the stimulus was too small. Now along comes another man, the local preacher, telling us we are sinking because of our sins (which are many) and will yank the rescue rope away.
The result will not be pretty.
The Republican Big Lie -- The Stimulus Worked
By Sir Harold Evans
The expected Republican victory on Tuesday will be built on an untruth: that President Obama’s stimulus didn’t work. Sir Harold Evans sets the record straight.
Millions will go to the polls tomorrow deceived by a brilliant propaganda campaign. They may have many reasons to vote against the Obama administration. Many of the criticisms may be justified, many not. Take your pick.
I am concerned only with one. I call it The Big Lie because its acceptance has had a big impact on all our lives and it will continue to have a big impact, like a malign virus that one ingests wreaks progressive damage.
The Big Lie is that the aggressive fiscal and monetary measures by which Obama defended America in the Great Recession were a waste of money, a notorious example of the Democratic appetite for throwing money at any problem.
The summary charge is that “the stimulus did not work.” It has been propagated in a blizzard of television ads, in the slogans of Tea Party rallies, in countless vehement blogs and in print. Mostly this has been argument by assertion, even from such a distinguished writer as George Will. There has been precious little analysis of what effect the money had, and barely any reporting of what serious analysis there has been.
CNN made a valiant effort early on and then seems to have gotten bored–or should we say gored by ratings–and two authoritative reports have been published (I will come to them), but they have been washed over, flotsam on the tide of ignorance. Even this bright Monday morning, the New York Post publishes a Big Lie article by Stephen M. Meister, a partner in the law firm of Meister, Seelig and Fein LLP who writes that from the stimulus “none of the jobs showed up.”
The Obama administration made a tactical error in trying to be precise. It estimated that the stimulus spending would keep unemployment to 8 percent or less. But the commonplace assertion and the widespread notion that no jobs have resulted from the program is off by an order of magnitude that if made in business would instantly bankrupt millions of going concerns.
Beware the GOP Coronation -- Contractors, subcontractors and other recipients of stimulus monies were required by law to document each calendar quarter the number of jobs funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Just to take the second quarter of this year, the number certified is 750,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Extrapolating from receipts already in by using reliable mathematical models, the number of men and women put back to work just in the second quarter of 2010 is at least 1.4 million!
These numbers are contained in a report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Let’s be nice to most of the people saying the stimulus had no effect and presume they never got round to reading the CBO report. That is probably a fair assumption, or otherwise the population of the United States would have an extraordinary number of people with noses as long as the Golden Gate Bridge. But the Republican leaders in Congress could be expected to read Congressional documents they speak about–couldn’t they? They have no excuse for their Big Lie sold time and again to the gullible masses.
Maybe the Congressional liars will come back to say they don’t believe their own budget office, which would be ironical because it would involve them refusing to believe that the same office’s estimate of our deficit is much exaggerated.
But come away from the once-hallowed halls of Congress. The serial retailers of the Big Lie should read the careful econometric report by two independent and distinguished economists, the former Deputy Chairman of the Fed, Alan S. Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton University, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.
Blinder and Zandi examined the effect of TARP and the stimulus using Moody’s Analytical Model of the US economy. They reported, “We find the effects on real GDP, jobs and inflation are huge and probably averted what could have been called The Great Depression 2.0.”
“Without the government response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5 percent lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8.5 million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.”
It is a tragedy, since if we are to have more refusal to face the effects of the stimulus, as now seems likely, life is going to get a lot more miserable for millions.
They attribute the larger part of this wholly benign result to have been from saving the financial system–something begun under President Bush and completed under Obama. Nonetheless, the effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising real GDP by about 3.4 percent, holding the unemployment rate about one-and-a-half percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls.
The Big Lie is a disgrace to all who have uttered it, knowingly or unknowingly. It is worse. It is a tragedy, since if we are to have more refusal to face the effects of the stimulus, as now seems likely, life is going to get a lot more miserable for millions after one of the worst elections I’ve ever seen in many years of reporting.
We were like a man a sinking in a swamp. A good neighbor rushed along and threw us a rope. It just about stopped us sinking. But it didn’t get us out. It was too short, just as the stimulus was too small. Now along comes another man, the local preacher, telling us we are sinking because of our sins (which are many) and will yank the rescue rope away.
The result will not be pretty.
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