Above the Fold

    Now, in the wake of the Massachusetts result, Congressional Democrats seem to be running for the hills instead of making every possible effort to pass a health care reform bill.
                                 –FCP, January 22, 2010

    To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.
                                –Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 28, 2010

    There was quite a lot to admire in last night’s State of the Union speech–a combination of plain truths and worthy policy proposals.   These were some of the highlights:

* The lobbyists are trying to kill [the financial reform bill passed by the House.] But we cannot let them win this fight.

* We still need health insurance reform

* From some on the right, I expect we’ll hear a different argument -– that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is that’s what we did for eight years. That’s what helped us into this crisis [although that’s what created this crisis would have been stronger–and more accuate.]

* Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.

* With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests–including foreign corporations –to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.  They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps  to correct some of these problems.

* Let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years –- and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service to correct some of these problems.

* This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.  It’s the right thing to do.

    These were all admirable declarations–and none more so than the president’s reminder to the Senate Democrats that even after their defeat in Massachusetts, they still have their largest majority in decades. 

    Of course, Obama has never had a problem giving a fine speech.

    The problem, so far, has been follow-up.

    I always thought the fact that Obama was the product of the Chicago Democratic machine was one of the most appealing parts of his resume–because it made it plausible that this freshman Senator could be strong enough to become an effective president.

    Confronted by a Republican minority which is reflexively committed to going for the jugular, what the Democrats have needed for years is a comparable toughness.   If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can’t provide that, the White House somehow has to find a way to provide that missing backbone.

    As Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday, in one of his most powerful columns, patricians like FDR and JFK never hesitated to battle their own class.  Rich wrote that Obama desperately needed something like JFK’s U.S. Steel moment–the president’s broadside against the steel maker after its chairman decided to “break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages).”  Kennedy’s assault left reporters “literally gasping,” according to Dick Reeves, and U.S. Steel backed down two days later.

    So populist rhetoric against the banks–“We all hated the bank bailout”–is fine as far as it goes.  But what this administration needs more than anything else right now is proof that there will be serious consequences for anyone who derails its agenda.  It needs actual results, on health care, and financial reform, and it needs them well  before Washington’s cherry blossoms reach their peak at the beginning of April. 

    Up until now, the hallmark of Rahm Emanuel’s political management has been a terror of replicating the mistakes of the Clinton administration.   That’s why Obama waited much too long to roll up his sleeves, and involve himself directly in the health care negotiations.  And that is also why Obama’s campaign promise to repeal Clinton’s idiotic don’t ask, don’t tell policy for gays in the military remains unfulfilled twelve months after Obama took office–even though the political climate (and the poll numbers) are dramatically different in 2010 than they were in 1993.

    Instead of reflexively avoiding Clinton’s mistakes, it’s time to emulate Lyndon Johnson’s mastery at manipulating the Congress.   Rahm Emanuel played a big role in creating the large majorities the Democrats enjoy right now in both houses.  Now it’s time to make them produce the kind of legislation we can all be proud of.

    If that doesn’t happen soon, all the predictions of disaster for Democrats in the fall are certain to come true.

                                                               -30-

Winners & Sinners / Martin Luther King Jr. Day edition.

Winner:  Scott Horton.  This morning Harper’s Magazine jumped its publication date for the March issue by thirty days to rush out Scott Horton’s blockbuster cover story  about three possible murders at Guantanamo which the government and the mainstream media have always described as suicides.

    The piece also identified a black site on Guantanamo where those who died may have been tortured on the night of their supposed suicide.

    Horton is a law professor, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and one of the finest torture reporters of our time.

    At the heart of the cover-up Horton alleges is the fact that the Pentagon told the press–and convinced most reporters–that the three prisoners who died had hanged themselves.  However, Horton has interviewed five American servicemen who gave this account of what Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, told a meeting of fifty guards at 7am the morning after the prisoners had died.

    The commander said to the guards, “you all know” that the prisoners committed suicide by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death.  “But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells.  It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes.”

    Horton says Bumgarner refused all of his requests for interviews, although Bumgarner did attack the story today to the Associated Press  after it was posted on the Harper’s website.

   The guards interviewed by Horton said the night of the prisoners’ deaths, the guards believed that they had witnessed the prisoners’ removal to the black site away from the prison compound.  They also said that their clear site lines from the guard towers made it possible for them to know that none of the prisoners had been taken from their cells to the medical center on the night of their deaths.

    In a  article entitled “The Battle for Guantánamo” in The New York Times Magazine in 2006, Tim Golden wrote about Col. Bumgarner’s efforts to humanize conditions at Guantanamo.  He also reported the “suicides” of these three prisoners as an established fact.

   Golden never interviewed any of the guards quoted in Horton’s story.  Yesterday, he told FCP that he had read Horton’s story “quickly,” but he refused to make any comment about it.

   Some of the guards interviewed by Horton ridiculed Golden’s piece as “stenography” for Col. Bumgarner.

    Horton’s story also accuses the Obama administration of allowing the Justice Department to conduct an investigation of these deaths which was nothing more than a continuation of the cover-up that started under George Bush.

    He writes that the chief investigator in the case, Teresa McHenry, “has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos” which authorized the torture conducted at Guantanamo and elsewhere.  McHenry refused to discuss her role in the preparation of that memo with Horton.

    Tune in to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown tonight on MSNBC, where Horton is expected to produce new evidence casting doubt on Col. Bumgarner’s credibility.

Sinners: David Carr and Tim Arango, who wrote a worshipful, 1,943 word profile
 of fox News Chief Roger Ailes for the front page of The New York Times–which included exactly one paragraph of balance:

         “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” said Matthew Freud, who is married to Ms. Murdoch and whom PR Week magazine says is the most influential public relations executive in London.”

    The other 1,878 words were favorable–because Fox is supposedly the most profitable division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.  And why would anyone bother to mention that those profits come from constantly stirring up the dumbest 1 percent of the American TV audience with lies, hatred, and the never-ending tears of Glenn Beck?  The sad truth is, readers of The New York Times almost never learn the truth about Fox or Beck or the rest of the serial prevaricators on that network.  For that information, you have to be a regular viewer of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

Sinner: Lloyd Grove, for his appalling review of a new biography of Molly Ivins in The New York Times Book Review–one of the worst FCP has ever read.  Who was the genius editor who decided that a failed gossip columnist like Grove would be the best person to evaluate the life of one of the most important progressive journalists of the 20th century?  According to Grove,  “Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life isn’t convincing as the biography of a significant figure in journalism”, mostly because “Ivins never wrote the big, important book about Texas that she’d always wanted to.”

The fact that she was one of the great newspaper columnists of her era, who was right about Iraq, George Bush and oh-so-much else when the geniuses in the Washington press corps were getting it all wrong, well, Grove (an alumnus of that fabulous group) doesn’t mention that.  To understand who Ivins really was, read Paul Krugman’s great column about her or FCP’s own tribute.   Or CJR’s excellent review of the book here.

Winner: The indispensable Hendrik Hertzberg, for his laugh-out-loud review  in this week’s New Yorker of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book–the first account of the 2008 campaign to be “told in the style of an airport potboiler.”  Says Hertzberg:

      Game Change is a bit like those tabloid photo features in which celebrities are caught with their cellulite showing. What do we learn from it, apart from the news that the thighs of the famous may be lumpier than they look onscreen? One lesson is that the eagerness of political operatives to trash tends to be inversely proportional to the power, present and future, of the trashee.

Winner: Tony Judt, for one of the most important pieces of 2009: What is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy, published last month in The New York Review of Books. His 6,600 word article is a devastating account of the sharp decline of the Western World over the last three decades–and essential reading for anyone disturbed by the perilous condition of American democracy.  For this, it was also the winner of the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award for December.
                                                                         -30-

Above the Fold

More than a year after the rescue began, crucial questions remain unanswered. Who knew what, and when? Who benefitted, and by exactly how much? Would A.I.G.’s counterparties have failed without taxpayer support?…We know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers…The government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of “open source” investigation.
                                               –Eliot Spitzer, Frank Partnoy and William Black

The President should do more. He should instruct his Attorney General, Eric Holder, that one of his highest priorities should be holding criminally liable those who engaged in illegal activities on Wall Street that nearly caused our banking system and, indeed, our entire economy to collapse.
                                               –Edward I. Koch

What profits the banks have made over the last year were funded by oodles of cheap financing provided by the Federal Reserve. This is a windfall that they should not be allowed to keep…Bankers are likely to scream…No one should be intimidated…A windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses would not be enough, but it would be a start.

                                               –from an editorial in The New York Times

        This week the Obama administration will quite rightly celebrate a huge achievement, one which eluded six previous Democratic presidents–a giant step towards universal health care for every American citizen.  Yes, the Senate bill is vastly inferior to the House version, and not just because of the absence of a public option, but it is also a very important beginning, and it represents a triumph over a fiercely-united, know-nothing Republican minority, which was paid tens of millions of dollars by the medical-industrial complex to prevent anything from passing.
 
       When David Gregory pointed out yesterday that the president’s approval ratings are still sliding downward, White House counselor David Axelrod was perfectly correct to point out that no poll numbers will really matter until October of next year, on the eve of the next Congressional election.  And if health care reform is accompanied by a genuinely rebounding economy, all of the predictions of massive Democratic losses in that election may prove to be unfounded.

        But despite these “green shoots” of optimism, the Obama administration still faces a gigantic political problem because of the way it has treated Wall Street.  Even if the financial reform bill Barney Frank is shepherding through the House survives a much more conservative Senate, this administration must finally put some real muscle behind its anti-Wall Street rhetoric.

        Of course it was welcome to hear the president tell Steve Croft, “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of…fat cat bankers on Wall Street. Nothing has been more frustrating to me this year than having to salvage a financial system at great expense to taxpayers that was precipitated, that was caused in part by completely irresponsible actions on Wall Street.”  But now he must do something decisive to dispel the idea that the administration’s first priority is to keep Goldman Sachs happy.  And the best way to do that would be to embrace the powerful  advice of two middle-of-the-road Democrats and one very-slightly-left-of-center newspaper.

        Eliot Spitzer is the undisputed master of how to investigate Wall Street fraud to propel a political career, and the Obama administration could learn volumes from studying Spitzer’s tenure as New York’s attorney general.  Spitzer’s proposal to force a government-owned A.I.G. to make public all of its emails is good policy and good politcs.  So is Ed Koch’s admonition to focus the Justice Department’s attention on the bankers who knowingly participated in the massive fraud which came so close to destroying the economy.  And the windfall tax advocated by The New York Times could be the single most popular policy change the president could champion.
 
       Earlier this month the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned Robert Khuzami, the enforcement director of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general of the criminal division at the Justice Department; and Kevin Perkins, the F.B.I.’s assistant director in charge of its criminal investigative division, to find out why it is taking so long to hold anyone accountable for Wall Street’s criminal shenanigans. 

        “Why aren’t we seeing more board room prosecutions?” Ted Kaufman, Democratic senator of Delaware, demanded.  Assistant attorney general Breuer replied that the cases were “complicated,” and would take a long time to investigate, “but they will be brought.”

        Khuzami said the S.E.C. had already gone after top officials in the mortgage industry–like Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial–but he too said that other areas of the financial industry were a bit more complicated to investigate.  And the FBI’s man said that a new interagency financial fraud enforcement task force created only last month would speed up the process, and could lead to more prosecutions down the road.
 
       This is much too little,  too late.  What we need now is a president who will match not only the rhetoric but also the bravery of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the greatest American president of the 20th Century.

        These were Roosevelt’s words during his first re-election campaign in 1936.  Obama must now find  the courage to adopt Roosevelt’s tone, and his policies:
 

         We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.  They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

         Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.  I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

            From FDR’s lips to Obama’s ears.

                                                                               -30-

Special thanks to FCP contributors DEK and JWS.

 Above the Fold

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

                                         –Martin Luther King Jr., Riverside Church, 1967

“Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.”                              

                                          –President Barack Obama, Oslo, 2009

    Barack Obama gave the best speech he could last week–given the fact that he had decided to expand the war in Afghanistan just ten days before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.   He nodded to Gandhi and quoted the speech Martin Luther King gave when  he  accepted the Nobel : “Violence never brings permanent peace.  It solves no social problem:  it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” 

   Obama added, “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.  I know there’s nothing weak – nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

    It’s true that presidents do not have the same freedom of action as civil rights leaders.  But it is also true that Martin Luther King’s decision to oppose to the War in Vietnam was one of the best and most important things he ever did–even though it brought him the opprobrium of practically the entire white liberal establishment at the time.

    Just like Lyndon Johnson, Obama has chosen to commit American blood and treasure to a deeply corrupt government which lacks the support of most of his citizens, without any real plan for victory, or even much of a benchmark for success.  And in Obama’s latest speech we also hear another echo of LBJ, who was forever invoking the ghost of appeasement in Europe in the 1930’s as a reason for American adventurism in the 1960’s: “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies,” Obama declared in Oslo.

    It is Obama, rather than his critics, who has misread the historical lessons of Vietnam.   Here, I believe, we are paying a serious price for having elected a president who is too young to have any adult memories of Vietnam.

    Naturally, Obama tried hard to put the best face on America’s infatuation with war:
“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this:  The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.  The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.  We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.  We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

    Obama also said, “America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.”   That’s true, but our closest friends also include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and many other governments which are famously contemptuous of the rights of their citizens.

    But the biggest part of recent American history Obama needed to ignore to portray us as democracy’s defender is our shameful role as chief arms merchant to the world.   Not since Jimmy Carter was president has anyone made even a cursory effort to restrain American arms makers from selling their most expensive weapons to many of the poorest nations in the world.

    Only once in the last thirty years did the world pay any attention to the consequences of the fervent competition among the developed nations to sell every tank and missile and airplane they can to the undeveloped ones.   That occurred after Saddam Hussein’s remarkably quick and successful invasion of Kuwait.

    As one historian has noted:
    Observers were initially struck by the speed and brazenness of the invasion, which could only be viewed as a willful violation of international law. But another aspect of the invasion also sparked international attention: the fact that Iraqi forces were equipped with very large numbers of sophisticated weapons that had been obtained from foreign suppliers. During the previous eight years Iraq had spent an estimated $43 billion on imported weapons, giving it the most modern and powerful arsenal of any nation in the developing world. Many of these arms were supplied by the Soviet Union (long Iraq’s major supplier), but others were acquired from France and other Western countries. This led to widespread charges that the major suppliers bore some degree of responsibility for Iraq’s aggressive behavior, in that they had provided the means for mounting the 1990 invasion.

    In the aftermath of Kuwait, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council met twice in 1991 and pledged to develop new controls on the international arms trade.  But before the next scheduled meeting of the group of five took place in 1992, to formalize the restrictions, the first president Bush decided sell 150 F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan.  A furious China withdrew from the negotiations, which gave everyone else an excuse to boycott them–and they have never been revived since.

    During the administration of the second President Bush, foreign arms sales exploded–from $12 billion in 2005 to $32 billion in 2008.  As Eric Lipton noted  in a fine story in The New York Times last year,

    The United States has long been the top arms supplier to the world. In the past several years, however, the list of nations that rely on the United States as a primary source of major weapons systems has greatly expanded. Among the recent additions are Argentina, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Georgia, India, Iraq, Morocco and Pakistan, according to sales data through the end of last month provided by the Department of Defense. Cumulatively, these countries signed $870 million worth of arms deals with the United States from 2001 to 2004. For the past four fiscal years, that total has been $13.8 billion.  In many cases, these sales represent a cultural shift, as nations like Romania, Poland and Morocco, which have long relied on Russian-made MIG-17 fighter jets, are now buying new F-16s, built by Lockheed Martin.

    This is just the tip of the military-industrial complex Obama confronts as president, and he has gotten practically no pressure from anyone to confront it head on.

    The key moment in the Afghanistan debate occurred in London at the end of September when General Stanley McChrystal rejected the possibility of scaling back the American war effort there.   This was a clear act of insubordination, which, in another time and place, would have led to the general’s firing. 

   That, of course, is the way Harry Truman dealt with General Douglas MacArthur when he ignored the president’s wishes during the Korean War.

    But this time no one ever thought McChrystal would be fired.   Justin Feldman, the wisest political analyst I know, observed that if Defense Secretary Robert Gates had responded to the London speech the way he should have–by firing McChrystal–Obama would at least have had the option of rejecting his demand for tens of thousands of additional troops.   “Obama was boxed in politically as a new president,” Feldman said.   “He has too much on his plate–and if Gates wouldn’t fire McChrystal, Obama couldn’t afford to have Gates and McChrystal bail out on him.”

    So instead of the dramatic change so many of us hoped for when we cast our ballots for president 13 months ago, when it comes to war and peace, it seems we will mostly continue to see more of the same.

                                                             -30-

————————————————————————————————————-

Leo Siqueira of Brazil’s canal da imprensa interviews FCP about Obama here.