Category: Politics

No bleeps for The Economist, which gleefully quotes the unexpurgated complaint against Blago.

Corruption in Illinois

Few expected the 76-page complaint against Mr Blagojevich to present such a feast of bad behaviour. “Fire those fuckers,” he said of those who wrote critical editorials about him at the Chicago Tribune, and threatened to hurt the paper financially if it did not oblige. “If they don’t perform, fuck ’em”, he said of an effort to squeeze contributions from a state contractor. But the most stunning charge is that Mr Blagojevich, who can appoint a nominee to hold Mr Obama’s seat in the Senate until the scheduled election is held in 2010, wanted to sell the seat to the highest bidder. (The governor called the seat “a fucking valuable thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing” and is alleged to have sought to get a big job in return for it.)

Geoff Pullum says it’s for the best, and that the US media shouldn’t let Blago off the fucking hook.

Americans don’t think well of people who talk like this when they have important roles in public life. That means that a small additional offense by such individuals may go unnoticed: their hypocrisy in being elected on fair words and clean talk and then relaxing into a very different foul-mouthed persona once in the job. By censoring even mentions of the taboo vocabulary of such hypocrites, the mainstream press helps to protect them. Less of the evidence of what they’re like gets out there.

Arundhati Roy.

The Monster in the Mirror

… The only way to contain — it would be naïve to say end — terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says “Justice,” the other “Civil War.” There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

Following Dean Baker’s advice,

NYT Piece on Schumer/Democrats Ties to Wall Street

Anyone was wondering why the bank bailouts seem more designed to help Wall Street than the economy should read this piece.

—Dean Baker

…we find this handy graphic:

“We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws and make sure New York remains No. 1 for decades on into the future.”

— Senator Charles E. Schumer, referring to financial regulations, Jan. 22, 2007

…
While Mr. Schumer has taken some pro-consumer stances, his critics fault him for tilting too far toward Wall Street in balancing his responsibilities.

“He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public,” said John C. Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group, the giant mutual fund house. “It has hurt the American investor first and the average American taxpayer.”
…
To Christopher Cox, the Republican chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the need for action was obvious in the spring of 2006.

His agency, which would later be criticized for a 2004 ruling that let banks pile up debt, had grown deeply concerned about lack of oversight of the nation’s largest credit-rating agencies, like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service. Linchpins of the financial system, their ratings are vital to safeguarding investors by evaluating the risks of bonds and other debt. After the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, which had repeatedly been awarded favorable ratings, the agencies had agreed to meet voluntary standards.

But the S.E.C. concluded that those agreements were inadequate, so Mr. Cox urged Congress to give his agency oversight powers. “Without additional legislative authority, the S.E.C. will not be able to regulate in a thoroughgoing way,” he told the Senate banking committee at an April 2006 hearing.

The plan drew broad, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But executives at the credit-rating agencies soon began pressing Mr. Schumer and other allies in Congress to block the proposal or at least limit its reach, according to current and former employees.

“They knew Schumer would support them,” said one former Moody’s executive, who asked not to be named because he still works in the industry. “He was their go-to guy,” the executive said.

While the Manhattan-based agencies were not significant campaign donors to Mr. Schumer or the Senate campaign committee, their lobbyists and many of their clients were.

At that time, revenues for the agencies were skyrocketing. The housing market was robust, and Wall Street investment firms were paying the agencies to rate various mortgage-backed securities after first advising the firms — and also collecting fees — on how to package them to get high credit ratings.

It was an obvious conflict of interest, financial experts now say. Despite their high ratings, many of those securities, based on risky loans, would prove worthless, roiling markets and threatening financial institutions worldwide.

But Mr. Schumer argued that the companies voluntarily met requirements to eliminate such possible conflicts. He suggested that regulators simply encourage competition and disclosure of agencies’ ratings methods. There was perhaps no need for an intrusive new law, he said in the spring of 2006. “They’ve implemented their codes of conduct,” Mr. Schumer told Mr. Cox at a Senate hearing. “They’re making good-faith efforts.”

Mr. Schumer could not stop the legislation from passing, but he managed to get the measure amended so that it explicitly prohibited the S.E.C. from regulating the procedures and methods the agencies use to determine ratings.
…

Sean Penn in The Nation.

Sean Penn: Conversations With Chávez and Castro

Hitchens sits quietly, taking notes throughout the conversation. Chavez recognizes a flicker of skepticism in his eye. “CREES-to-fer, ask me a question. Ask me the hardest question.” They share a smile. Hitchens asks, “What’s the difference between you and Fidel?” Chavez says, “Fidel is a communist. I am not. I am a social democrat. Fidel is a Marxist-Leninist. I am not. Fidel is an atheist. I am not. One day we discussed God and Christ. I told Castro, I am a Christian. I believe in the Social Gospels of Christ. He doesn’t. Just doesn’t. More than once, Castro told me that Venezuela is not Cuba, and we are not in the 1960s.”

“You see,” Chavez says, “Venezuela must have democratic socialism. Castro has been a teacher for me. A master. Not on ideology but on strategy.” Perhaps ironically, John F. Kennedy is Chavez’s favorite US president. “I was a boy,” he says. “Kennedy was the driving force of reform in America.” Surprised by Chavez’s affinity for Kennedy, Hitch chimes in, referring to Kennedy’s counter-Cuba economic plan for Latin America: “The Alliance for Progress was a good thing?” “Yes,” says Chavez. “The Alliance for Progress was a political proposal to improve conditions. It was aimed at lowering the social difference between cultures.”…

via Sam Smith

Thus Yves Smith.

Why is “Nationalization” A Dirty Word in America?

…
This New York Times article deals with the Obama team’s reluctance †o be seen as “nationalizing”. I see. So we would rather pander to the bankrupt ideology that helped create this mess, let the perps continue to get undeserved princely pay, and stick the hapless sop taxpayer with the guaranteed-to-be-rotten fruit of this exercise rather than demonstrate leadership and reframe the issues. The hesitation to demand even modest quid pro quos is beyond belief. No private sector negotiator would ever accept such a deal.

Is this “Change We Can Believe In?” Looks like the same old crap to me, with better salesmen in charge.

The golden rule is that he who provides the gold, makes the rules. Time to get over prostrating before the private sector when it has abjectly screwed up.
…

It seems to be a morning for exceptional posts. Not mine, but I can point to ’em. (I did miss Krugman’s Nobel lecture, 3am here on the left coast. Have to catch the video, I guess.)

George W. Bush – An Appreciation

… But who, in fact, was he? And I think the plain answer is that he was no one special, one more failed scion of a failing family, a ruler who could only be considered remarkable, whether for better or worse, in a nation that still fancies itself a democracy. Were we communists, or better yet a monarchy, his vapidity and mediocrity wouldn’t shock us at all. People less in thrall to the myth of their own great, national, deliberative process are less inclined to surprise when a bumbler, an asshole, or a moron shows up in the imperial palace, playing dress-up and treating international affairs like a board game. Your own experience in a hierarchy without democratic pretensions should tell you as much. It might drive you nuts, but when was the last time you were surprised that the boss turned out to be an idiot? One could make the case, perhaps, that elections are a reasonable scheme for a city-state somewhere, but a hundred million harried citizens making hazy decisions after two years of propaganda isn’t qualitatively different from the happenstance of heredity or the rolling of dice. And George W. Bush, god bless him, is the proof.

Who Would’ve Thought, It Figures

Last month, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading on BearingPoint because its stock price had fallen too low.  Yesterday the price was 3.45 cents a share.  Alejandro Lazo writes in today’s Washington Post:

Jamie Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial who dropped coverage of the company in recent weeks, said that while the company’s government contracting business has held up in recent years, its commercial side has suffered from competition overseas and managerial missteps.

Now … this is kind of interesting.  It’s like, oh, rain on your wedding day, or ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.  BearingPoint, of course, was hired by the Bushies to structure rules for a free market economy in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of an All-American pre-fab Galt’s Gulch program flown in on a C-130 for the eagerly awaiting locals with all those flowers in their hands.  

…and doesn’t like what he sees.

Nir Rosen: The Broken State

Training the Afghan army is a worthy goal, but in the meantime the country is increasingly in the hands of a fractious band of Taliban, allied with myriad leaders who think nothing of battling one another. There is no sign that the Taliban are weakening: they have an apparently endless supply of men and arms and they don’t mind losing large numbers of men, because even casualties can be spun into propaganda that suggests they have plenty of followers to spare. They do not have the power they did in the 1990s, when they swept across Afghanistan with little resistance, or the popular support they enjoyed while fighting the Russians. Although the Taliban will never be able to defeat the US-led coalition, that same coalition will not be able to uproot the Taliban from rural Afghanistan, wipe out their bases of support and recruitment in Pakistan, or cut them off from the Afghan population.

The former Taliban government official – who served as a mujahideen commander until 1992 – reminded me that the Soviet army was larger and more powerful than the coalition today, with more than 100,000 troops, and that the Afghan government they supported was stronger than the current one as well.

“The end will be like with the Russians,” he said. “The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding, the evacuation of foreigners. It’s coming to the same situation – by 1985 or 1986, the Communist forces held only the provincial capitals. There were 465,000 military and civilian members of the puppet government. But the Russians were still confined to their bases.”

John Scalzi explains it all for you.

Uh, Canada

Been asked a couple times now if I had any thoughts about what’s going on with the political situation up north there in Canada, and I have to say: Honestly, I don’t know what the hell’s going on up there. They had an election, and the Prime Minister said “nyah,” and then the other political parties said, “Oh, no you DIN’T” and then exploding space monkeys swarmed Ottawa and the Queen had to fly over to beat people and monkeys with her scepter and at the end of it all Quebec was put on the block? And traded for a fish? Or something? It’s all really confusing to us simple folks down here in the US, with our uncomplicated election process that never goes wrong, ever. All I know is at the end of it, Canada will still have national health care and we won’t. So there’s that.

Juan Cole with a bit of (presumably informed) conjecture about Pakistan and the nasty business in Mumbai. Another bumper harvest of whirlwind.

Pakistani Reaganism Must End: The New Government must take on the Lashkar

I saw this militarization of Pakistani civil society with my own eyes. I first went to the country in 1981 before you could just buy a Kalashnikov in the bazaar. When I was doing research there in 1988 and then again in 1990, the situation was completely different. Pakistan had never had a drug problem but now there were a million addicts (the US encouraged the Afghan mujahidin to grow poppies for heroin to finance the anti-Soviet struggle, and the drugs spilled into Pakistan). Weapons were freely available. Karachi was having a kind of civil war. I remember that fanatics from the religious right attacked an art exhibition in Lahore, a city of the arts (graven images not allowed & etc.) Political figures were accused of cynically creating Islamic movements for personal and political gain. This deterioration of Pakistan was, in some important part, a direct result of Reagan-Bush policies. They used Pakistan, corrupted it with all those drugs, arms, and radical Muslim militias that they called ‘freedom fighters,’ and then threw it away when they did not need it any more. Reagan and the Saudis funneled billions to the Pakistani military. What did ordinary Pakistanis have to show for it?

When the Soviets withdrew in 1988-1989 from Afghanistan and the Mujahideen took over, the Pakistani military lost control of its northern neighbor. It therefore funded and promoted the Taliban (expatriate Afghan young men who had been through Deobandi seminaries in northern Pakistan) from 1994, enabling them to take over Afghanistan. The Taliban ran terrorist training camps, at which the Sipah-e Sahaba and the Lashkar-e Tayiba trained for missions in Kashmir. Afghanistan in essence was the boot camp for Pakistani Reaganism.

…

High Dudgeon of Americans directed at the Pakistani military for this activity is the height of hypocrisy. The Reagan administration actively encouraged Islamabad to mount precisely such activities against the leftist government of Afghanistan (which, while dictatorial and brutally oppressive, was busily educating girls, admitting women to professions, spreading literacy, working against the vestiges of landlord feudalism, etc.) From a Pakistani point of view, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir were morally equivalent.

Of course you want to read Matt Taibbi. “Pinochet in heels”? All right!

Requiem for a Maverick

The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush’s legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

I witness the whole pathetic mess summed up a week before the election, on a baseball field in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The campaign has scheduled an outdoor rally, with a joint appearance by McCain and Palin, at this crucial moment in the race. But now there is driving snow and sleet, trees downed on roads all around, and the campaign — with no alternate indoor plan — is forced to cancel the event at the last minute. I watch as locals keep pulling up to the field, looking for the candidate, a lonely, rain-soaked “Country First” banner whipping back and forth above the stage. The whole scene captures the essence of the McCain run perfectly: Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.

It was like that all election season. McCain kicked off his campaign with a stump speech that emphasized his inspirational personal story and experience. Then he picked someone even less experienced than Obama as his running mate and switched to a strategy of attacking his opponent’s relationships with people like Bill Ayers. When that petered out, he switched to a new line of attack, trotting out the socialism business and claiming Obama was running for the office of “redistributionist-in-chief.” The McCain camp tried running against the press, they tried running against Washington, they tried running against the Bush administration, they even tried running against the “liberal feminist agenda” — the latter just a few weeks after Sarah Palin called herself a feminist.

No doubt that’s an over-dramatic characterization. Interesting stuff, though. Ordinarily a no-confidence vote would mean a new election, but the last election was in October, and Harper is (again) heading a minority government.

Liberals, NDP, Bloc sign deal on proposed coalition

The Liberals and New Democrats signed an agreement on Monday to form an unprecedented coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois, if they are successful in ousting the minority Conservative government in a coming confidence vote.

The accord between parties led by Stéphane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe came just hours after Liberal caucus members agreed unanimously that Dion would stay on to lead the Liberal-NDP coalition, with support in the House of Commons from Bloc MPs.

The six-point accord includes a description of the role of the Liberal and NDP caucuses, which would meet separately and sit next to each other on the government benches in the House of Commons, Dion told a news conference alongside Layton and Duceppe.

Dion said he has advised Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean in a letter that he has the confidence of the Commons to form the government should Stephen Harper’s Conservatives be defeated in a confidence vote.

Lane Kenworthy, writing on the subject, includes this graph:

Coincidentally, in a Philosophy Bites episode Anne Phillips argues for equal (or near-equal) representation by gender, among other criteria.

Anne Phillips on Political Representation

Participatory democracy is impractical, so most democracies are representative democracies. But should the representatives reflect the variety of those they represent? In particular, should there be roughly half women in a representative democracy? Anne Phillips of the LSE believes that there should be far more women acting as political representatives than there are at present. In this interview for Philosophy Bites she explains why.

Largely missing from Phillips’s discussion is the question of whether we should be looking at opportunity or outcome (recognizing a close link between the two). Regardless, the poor representation of women in the US and UK legislatures is surely an indication that something needs fixing.

Where has IOZ been my whole life? Thanks to Brad DeLong for the pointer.

The Free Man

The Lieberman thing is pressing the predictable buttons out in Netrootsia, with smarter Donks feigning shock and dumber ones actually feeling it, as the Governing Class shows itself more inclined to embrace and forgive one of its own than to cater to impotent bloggers who will raise money and vote for whomever they’re told to vote for regardless. Uh, what Digby says:

I think it’s also pretty clear that if anyone thought there would be any investigations into Bush administration atrocities or judiciary committee hearings into the abuses of the executive branch, they can forget it.

Ya think? Perhaps this was meant as parody, because I find it difficult to imagine any breathing human being seriously entertaining the idea that Barack Obama’s first order of executive business would be to strip himself of powers accrued to the office during the previous administration.

I suppose I’ll never stop repeating it: the “atrocities” of the Bush administration were atrocities perpetrated by America for years, for decades. That they were practiced with less circumspection, and by a factional opponent against whom some electoral purchase might be gained—these are the only reasons todays putative liberals care. You can imagine when some of these “atrocities” are shown to have roots in the Clinton administration, in the Carter administration, under Kennedy, back to Wilson…well, Smears! Right Wing Noise Machine! Media!

President Obama will avail himself of the full powers available to him. He’ll make placatory cosmetic changes—”closing Guantanamo”—to please his base, but does anyone think he’s going to stop running black ops in Pakistan, that he’s going to repudiate his bellicose posture toward Iran, that he’s going to actually leave Iraq, as opposed to drawing down and retreating to heavily-fortified garrisons from which we might “respond to the contingencies in the region”? Hell, of course they’re letting Lieberman stay. They’re on the same side.