Year: 2010

Someone in the Obama administration has leaked the main findings of a government ethics report about the Bush II attorneys who wrote and published the memos that in various places stated the legal justification behind the following views: 1) waterboarding is not torture; 2) that the legal definition of tortured permitted a number of techniques that the common person would consider to be torture; and 3) that if the president orders it, it is by definition not torture.  All these views by the way came in John Yoo and Jay Bybee’s infamous 2002 memo to Alberto Gonzales.

The original draft of the report said that Yoo and Bybee had “had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics,” as yesterday’s Associated Press story puts it.

But a senior Justice Department official David Margolis reduced the charge to “using poor judgment,” which of course can’t lead to disbarment or other professional sanctions.  By the way, A.P. released its story at 2:00 a.m., Sunday morning, I guess in an effort to make sure the news got the coverage it deserves (that’s sarcasm!).

At least the Obama administration has been consistent when it comes to saying that we should let bygones be bygones and not prosecute the people who created the torture gulag that has shamed us and ruined our reputation in the world.  Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee and the dozens of henchmen who actually constructed our torture chambers—all are getting off scot free.  They won’t even receive the proper public venting provided by the Clinton impeachment for lying about an affair. 

But then there’s the matter of the shameful hypocrisy that the Obama administration has demonstrated about ending torture itself: Obama said he would end torture and close the Guantánamo facility.  Neither has happened. 

Those who voted for Obama who want to masochistically revel in betrayal should read Roger D. Hodge’s article titled “The Mendacity of Hope” in the February issue of Harper’s.  (FYI, The New York Times reported just this morning that Harper’s has fired Hodges.) The third and fourth paragraphs present a litany of disappointment and horror:

“Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the kidnapping and rendition of foreigners will continue, and the Bush Administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained; when even such mock trials provide too much justice, he will make do with indefinite detention. If, by some slim chance, a defendant were to be found not guilty, we have been assured that the president’s “post-acquittal” detention powers would then come into play.

The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as ‘the essence of who we are,’ no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue—as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that ‘the King can do no wrong,’ to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.”

The right-wing, military contractors and the news media have conspired to strike enough fear in the hearts of many U.S. citizens that they are happy—perhaps relieved is a better choice of words—to give up their freedom  and to have immoral, illegal and obscene acts committed in their names.  So let’s review again what’s wrong with torture:

• It is against both U.S. and international law.
• It is universally perceived as barbaric and immoral, an act that reduces the actor and those sponsoring the actor to the level of unethical bestiality.
• It doesn’t work, at least according to most experts and studies.  (But as with those who don’t believe our earth is getting warmer because of human interventions and those who believe that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime, the believers will take the word of a tiny minority of experts, who usually are in the employ or pay of the some faction of the believers).
• It puts our own combatants at risk, because once we torture we give de facto approval to our enemies to do the same.

We thus have something that’s illegal and immoral, makes people hate us, puts our own people at risk and doesn’t even work, and the Obama administration can’t summon up the courage to end it.  Truly shameful and disappointing.

The New York Times continued its campaign to get the average Jane-and-Joe to adopt the questionable ethics of investment or mortgage bankers this weekend with an article by Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago wondering why more of the millions of homeowners who owe more on their homes than the places are worth don’t just walk away from their mortgages, and their homes.  Thaler assumes that people are going to finally get with the program and start abandoning underwater homes in waves, and therefore proposes a big idea to stop this theoretical rush to default.

As I said in my January 11 blog entry about another New York Times article that explicitly advocated walking away from underwater mortgage, these economic experts propose that instead of passing regulations to restrain bankers and business operators from actions that common sense tells us are unethical (such as making loans to people with no means and then selling the loans in packages to investors), people should instead adopt the faulty ethics of the business world. 

It’s shameful that in this country freedom has been reduced to meaning that everyone can behave at the lowest common ethical denominator in a dog-eat-dog winner-take-all economic struggle.  It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to figure out that if we have minimum rules restraining economic actions, the rich will get richer at the expense of everyone else, because the lack of constraints creates an environment in which the possession of money gives the possessor an enormous edge. 

The rationale behind campaign contribution limits has always been to level the playing field by creating rules that limit the naked power of money.  Of course, the Supreme Court recently used the principle of “freedom of speech” as its rationale for declaring unconstitutional this attempt to create more real freedom of speech (the narrow margin of victory provided in advance by the Democrat’s decision not to filibuster the Roberts and Alito nominations several years back).

In yesterday’s news was an announcement that exemplified the kind of unethical behavior which unfortunately is quite common in the business world:  Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, two of the very biggest financial players, have defaulted on $4.4 billion in loans they used to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two vibrant middle class apartment complexes in Manhattan.  Each will lose $112 million, not pennies by any means, but as yesterday’s New York Times detailed, Tishman Speyer manages a $33.5 billion portfolio.  They’ll be nicked, but not hurt much.

The default will cost much, much more to the investors that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty brought into the deal when it purchased the two large apartment complexes for $5.4 billion at the top of the market in 2007.  For example, the pension fund for California public employees is losing $500 million and the Singapore government is losing $575 million.  Those who rent the apartments—completely innocent victims—are also suffering; for one thing, the company that is negotiating with Tishman Speyer and BlackRock is still looking for someone to manage the apartments now that Tishman Speyer is no longer doing so.

The investment went bad so these financial behemoths just walked away.  And these economic theorists are telling us that the average person should do the same.  Trust is the basic fabric which holds together every economic system.  Without appropriate regulation, we are allowing and enabling the actions of the big players and the words of many economic right-wingers continue to rip this basic fabric to shreds.

We’ve now learned that Scott Brown voted for the Massachusetts universal healthcare legislation when he was a state senator, but intends to vote against the current federal legislation in its current form.  Senator Brown gave his reasoning in a sound bite that National Public Radio ran for a few hours after his election victory over Martha Coakley last week.  (Note that I have been unable to find the bite in the NPR online archive and since the initial coverage, Brown has made a number of more conciliatory statements on the issue of healthcare reform that suggest that he already tacking back to the center.)

What Brown said, and this quote is not exact but rather an accurate recreation of his meaning most of his words, is that Massachusetts citizens have healthcare now and so why would he vote for a bill to cover others since it would likely cost the citizens of Massachusetts more money.

In other words, “I’ve got mine.  Screw everyone else.”  Once again, the politics of selfishness rears its ugly head and stares down the utilitarian notion that we as a people and our elected officials should care about the well-being of the country and our human community.  Freedom in the U.S. has grown to mean the freedom not to contribute to the common weal. 

Changing the topic: In the January 25 issue of The Nation (which was posted on the Nation website on January 7), William Greider reminds us that Social Security is not in as grave danger as its critics suggest, as long as the U.S. government pays back the money it has borrowed from the Social Security system to offset the U.S. budget’s deficit since the Reagan administration changed the bookkeeping rules for Social Security in the 80s. 

Now the U.S. has consistently paid off all the money it has ever borrowed from any source, but Greider details his fear that that it will renege on its debt obligation to Social Security if so-called “reformers” like Pete Peterson get their way.  I highly recommend that you read this article, and after doing so, please send a steady stream of correspondence to your Senators, Congressional representative and the President that you want the federal government to pay back what it owes the Social Security system and that no reform of Social Security should entail any plans to write off this debt.

There were many elements that led to Scott Brown defeating Martha Coakley to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat:

• The attractiveness of the candidate as a person: NPR has already discussed his viability as a presidential candidate.
• The uninspired campaign run by the Democrats until they were in trouble.
• The dumb luck and/or inspired planning to peak at the right moment.
• General anger at economic conditions.
• Displeasure because of the healthcare bill.
• Dislike of Obama.

The first three reasons have to do with politics, and mean nothing to the great ideological struggles in this country right now. 

So let’s consider the general anger over the economic conditions.  The media has fomented this anger in four distinct ways:

1. The need to come up with startling or awe-inspiring economic and business news every hour of every day creates an impatient and panicked public, one that sees its economic fortunes bouncing constantly from pillar to post.
2. The mainstream news media gives frequent voice to the false assumptions mouthed by many on the right that the recession belongs to Obama, despite the fact that Obama assumed office after the meltdown of the financial system because of the securitization of bad mortgages and after most of the massive layoffs had already occurred.
3. The ideological subtext of instant gratification—so necessary to keeping people buying goods and services— that imbues most non-news reporting makes people believe that all desires can be gratified instantly, including the desire for economic hard times to disappear.
4. The ideological subtext of much economic and business reporting that it’s always a good time to invest in stocks influenced both the news media and the government to declare the recession over while millions of people were still out of work or severely underemployed.  That might have pissed some people off, you think?

Interestingly enough, some of those who are angry over economic conditions want more government regulation and job stimulus programs, while others want fewer regulations and less government spending.  It is only the view of this second group that the mainstream news media insists on featuring.

When it comes to healthcare reform, it’s the same story as the economy: some people are angry because the likely bill doesn’t go far enough and others don’t want any bill at all.  In this case, I’m reasonably sure, though, that people angry because the bill doesn’t go far enough probably voted for Coakley, because they had nowhere else to go.

The news media played a role in creating anger over the health care bill, to be sure:

• The mix of sound bites from the “person in the street” interviews gave credence to incorrect information that reporters must have known was incorrect. 
• The entire phalanx of right-wing media repeated a series of lies, the biggest of which was the biggie that our health care system is better than those of other industrial and post-industrial states. 
• Perhaps the most pernicious act of the news media in the healthcare reform debate was the complete abdication of its responsibility to educate the public on what health care insurance is and does; for example, never presenting the fact that any public system in the United States would contract with insurance companies to process claims and provide oversight.

But I won’t blame the news media for the attitudes people currently have about healthcare reform: the management of the legislative process by the Democrats was so inept that it probably had the old Senate Master Lyndon Johnson turning in his grave.

I’m sure that some people voted for Brown because they dislike Obama, but I’m also fairly confident that most of them would have voted for Brown in any case. 

Unless dislike of Obama was the only reason they voted, that is, that the turnout on the right increased, while turnout of the poor, minorities and the young decreased (as compared to the Presidential election).  In fact, the Boston Globe reported that voting was heavy in the suburbs and light in the cities.

So at the end of the day, perhaps the real reason Brown won is that his people voted and Coakley’s (Obama’s) did not.  That of course points a finger at the political explanations listed at the beginning of this post.

One of the big discussions among liberals and lefties these days is whether or not to support the likely health care bill that will result from merging the House and Senate versions of health care reform.  In the most recent New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg lists some of the prominent lefties who have already come out against the likely bill.  I didn’t check his list of those advocating defeat of the likely bill, but it sounds right.  It includes Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, Keith Olbermann and MoveOn.org.  Hertzberg goes on to tells why he thinks we should all support the likely bill. 

I agree that we should support the bill, flawed though it is in the number of additional people it will cover, the nature of standard coverage moving forward and how we as a society will pay for it. 

The flaws of the likely bill, however, are kind of like Al Gore’s were in his race against Bush the Second in 2000.  The difference between this bill and no bill at all are enormous, as were the real differences between Gore and Bush.

But the din of the debate on side issues, such as if the government has the right to promote a given religion by not including a safe and legal medical procedure in its coverage, makes it easy to forget what it will mean if no bill passes.  Just as in 2000, when the din of issues blurring the differences included Gore’s role in the creation of the Internet and Bush’ supposedly greater “likeability” (which turned out to be as much hokum as Bud Light’s “drinkability”!).

And as with the failure of Gore to win, if this health care bill fails, I guarantee that the majority of Americans will regret it for years to come.

I think to a large degree, too much is being made of leftist opposition to the likely bill.  I like, respect and often agree with all of the people who made Hertzberg’s list, which is why I’m wondering hopefully if perhaps one or more of the lions of the left are currently stating opposition to the likely bill for tactical reasons—to make certain that the final bill is as much to their liking as possible, to remind the Democratic leadership of its large left-of-center constituency.