Tag Archives: Obama

Be careful what you wish for…

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From the LA Times:

Two years after the last recession ended, Wall Street is showing rising fear that the U.S. economy could be headed for a new downturn….Despite some relief that Washington could forge an eleventh-hour compromise on the debt ceiling, analysts said the prospect of even modest federal budget cuts in an anemic economy was spooking markets.

“Investors are looking past the budget situation and realizing this is an austerity plan,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. “We have an economy that’s struggling to stay afloat and we don’t have the ammunition to keep prodding it forward.”

(Mother Jones via Balloon Juice)

For extra credit, answer the following questions:

  • Are some (meaning those who have the most to lose financially) now waking up to the fact that cutting governmental expenditures while the economy continues its swoon might somehow further damage the economy?
  • Are there many economists available to provide expert advice cautioning against the adoption of such damaging policies?
  • Is America now officially certifiable?

The correct answers are yes, yes, and, by far the most damaging of all, yes.

What the “deal” means to the economy

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Unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise. Growth will be lower than it would be otherwise. And inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.

We have a very weak economy, so withdrawing more spending at this stage will make it even weaker.

– Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco.

The ransom paid to the GOP to increase the debt limit, an increase caused by the unpaid for wars, Bush tax cuts, and Medicare Part D, all of which were implemented by the Bush Administration, will be truly paid the the continued pain of the unemployed in America. The deal is a 100% Republican victory, embraced by the President.

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A curse on both their houses

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The President and the Republicans are both fiddling while Rome burns. Neither is addressing the real economic problem which is extremely high unemployment and suffering of families as a result.

George Parker, writing in The New Yorker, describes the situation accurately. An excerpt is below but the full essay is worth a read.

 

In Washington, President Barack Obama and Congress are engaged in high-drama brinksmanship, like members of an ordnance-disposal unit arguing about how to defuse a huge ticking bomb. Obama, securely in character, called on all sides to rise above petty politics, acknowledged the practical realities of divided government, and proposed a grand compromise that would lower the deficit by four trillion dollars. According to the Times’ Nate Silver, Obama’s offer, in its roughly four-to-one balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, falls to the right of the average American voter’s preference; in fact, it may outflank the views of the average Republican. Among other drastic cuts to domestic spending, the President proposes a ten-year, hundred-billion-dollar reduction in federal contributions to Medicaid, a program that helped provide new sets of teeth for Danny Hartzell and his wife just before their move.

 

The Republicans are also securely in character. They’ve rejected everything that the President has proposed, because Obama’s deal includes tax increases and the closing of loopholes for hedge-fund managers and corporate jets and companies that move offshore. Ninety-seven per cent of House Republicans have taken something called the “No Tax Pledge.” Some Republicans have also proposed that any deal require Obama to repeal the country’s new health-care law, which, had it been in place last year, would have provided the Hartzells with medical insurance, instead of forcing them to rely on charity hospitals for their daughter’s cancer treatment. Representative Paul Ryan’s ten-year budget plan, which remains his party’s blueprint for the future, would impose a fifty-per-cent cut on programs like food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, which, as long as Danny Hartzell remains jobless, represent the Hartzells’ only income. By the last day of June, the Hartzells had twenty-nine dollars to their name. The Republicans in Congress won’t be satisfied until the family is out on the street.

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Another Obama fail (updated)

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President Obama, despite campaign pledges to return to fully lawful legal interpretations, over-ruled the top lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and concluded that the US military attacks on Libya do not trigger the need for Congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

***

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

The result: we are now engaged in three wars in three foreign countries. The United States, by attacking Muslims around the world, is increasing the likelihood that radical elements in these countries will be more successful in recruiting future terrorists. And his action shows a disrespect for the rule of law and separation of powers that is disappointing coming from someone claiming to be a constitutional lawyer.

Update: Glenn Greenwald notes the parallels to George W. Bush:

Bush decided to reject the legal conclusions of his top lawyers and ordered the NSA eavesdropping program to continue anyway, even though he had been told it was illegal (like Obama now, Bush pointed to the fact that his own White House counsel (Gonzales), along with Dick Cheney’s top lawyer, David Addington, agreed the NSA program was legal).  In response, Ashcroft, Comey, Goldsmith, and FBI Director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign en masse if Bush continued with this illegal spying, and Bush — wanting to avoid that kind of scandal in an election year — agreed to “re-fashion” the program into something those DOJ lawyers could approve (the “re-fashioned” program was the still-illegal NSA program revealed in 2005 by The New York Times; to date, we still do not know what Bush was doing before that that was so illegal as to prompt resignation threats from these right-wing lawyers).

That George Bush would knowingly order an eavesdropping program to continue which his own top lawyers were telling him was illegal was, of course, a major controversy, at least in many progressive circles.  Now we have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping in a way that his own top lawyers are telling him is illegal, but waging war in that manner (though, notably, there is no indication that these Obama lawyers have the situational integrity those Bush lawyers had [and which Archibald Cox, Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus had before them] by threatening to resign if the lawlessness continues).

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Inside Job (updated)

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I just watched the film “Inside Job” (link to trailer) that dissects the causes of the “great recession” we are still suffering from. It is the most cogent and understandable explanation of a very complex set of issues I have seen yet. The film won a 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. Now out on Blue Ray and DVD. Watch it.

Update: And it looks like the Federal and New York regulators and prosecutors are finally getting serious about all this.

Your tax dollars at work

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Jane Mayer, writing the current issue of The New Yorker, tells an amazing story about a former NSA employee who is charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse inside the NSA. The article also describes the scope and illegality of the country’s warrantless wiretap program against Americans. I strongly recommend you read the entire article.

In December, 2005, the N.S.A.’s culture of secrecy was breached by a stunning leak. [The accused man was not involved in the story.] The Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the N.S.A. was running a warrantless wiretapping program inside the United States. The paper’s editors had held onto the scoop for more than a year, weighing the propriety of publishing it. According to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, President Bush pleaded with the paper’s editors to not publish the story; Keller told New York that “the basic message was: You’ll have blood on your hands.” After the paper defied the Administration, Bush called the leak “a shameful act.” At his command, federal agents launched a criminal investigation to identify the paper’s source.

The Times story shocked the country. Democrats, including then Senator Obama, denounced the program as illegal and demanded congressional hearings. A FISA court judge resigned in protest. In March, 2006, Mark Klein, a retired A.T. & T. employee, gave a sworn statement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was filing a lawsuit against the company, describing a secret room in San Francisco where powerful Narus computers appeared to be sorting and copying all of the telecom’s Internet traffic—both foreign and domestic. A high-capacity fibre-optic cable seemed to be forwarding this data to a centralized location, which, Klein surmised, was N.S.A. headquarters. Soon, USA Today reported that A.T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth had secretly opened their electronic records to the government, in violation of communications laws. Legal experts said that each instance of spying without a warrant was a serious crime, and that there appeared to be hundreds of thousands of infractions.

President Bush and Administration officials assured the American public that the surveillance program was legal, although new legislation was eventually required to bring it more in line with the law. They insisted that the traditional method of getting warrants was too slow for the urgent threats posed by international terrorism. And they implied that the only domestic surveillance taking place involved tapping phone calls in which one speaker was outside the U.S.

Drake [the accused former employee] says of Bush Administration officials, “They were lying through their teeth. They had chosen to go an illegal route, and it wasn’t because they had no other choice.” He also believed that the Administration was covering up the full extent of the program. “The phone calls were the tip of the iceberg. The really sensitive stuff was the data mining.” He says, “I was faced with a crisis of conscience. What do I do—remain silent, and complicit, or go to the press?”

Drake faces 35 years in prison if convicted. Yet, the masterminds of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program have gone unprosecuted.

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps [see the first related link below], is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

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Did bin Laden win?

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Osama bin Laden is now dead. Good.

But is it possible that he lost the battle but won the war? I think so. The changes that this country has put itself through since 9/11 are awesome and negative.

Radley Belko has a list of the self-imposed damage the US has done in reaction to bin Laden. An excerpt:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

Obama zings Trump (updated)

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President Obama, at last night’s White House Correspondence Dinner, with Trump present in the room:

And Seth Myers continues in kind with his Trump remarks beginning at 12:00 minutes in.

Update: Sunday morning, Donald Trump responded in typical Trump fashion:

Seth Meyers has no talent. He fell totally flat. In fact, I thought Seth’s delivery was so bad that he hurt himself.