Month: November 2010

Greg Sargent says that the Pentagon review of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy “will leave GOP moderates with no reasons left to oppose repeal.” Okay, let’s assume that the there actually are some GOP moderates. No, wait. Check that. Why would we assume such a silly thing? The reasons to oppose repeal are threefold. First, many members of Congress are immersed in a culture that absolutely abhors homosexuality and they won’t want to face the other members of their congregation if they vote to let gays serve openly in the military. Second, these people don’t give a shit about facts. Third, and most importantly, denying the president a victory on this issue makes him look weak, alienates a key Democratic constituency, and pisses off liberals. That’s a trifecta that even ‘moderate’ Republicans are powerless to resist.

I don’t honestly know how much more evidence we need to see before we begin to believe that the Republicans will never do the right thing if they think they can get some mileage out of doing the wrong thing.

John McCain once said that he’d consider changing his mind about DADT if the Joint Chiefs and theater commanders advised him to do so. He lied. He just doesn’t like gay people. I’ll be shocked if McCain listens to the commanders or his wife or his daughter or anyone else for that matter.

But, maybe, just maybe, we’ll have the two or three votes in the Senate that we’ll need to repeal the policy. I could see the Maine senators and maybe Scott Brown or Mark Kirk going for it. But, then again, they almost never miss an opportunity to piss off liberals. Can they resist this time?

That’s what this Tea Party bozo believes:

Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips said denying the right to vote to those who do not own property “makes a lot of sense” during a weekly radio program.

“The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote,” Phillips said. “It wasn’t you were just a citizen and you got to vote.”

“Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today,” he continued. “But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community.”

Well, since Banks are people too (cf. Citizens United)I guess that would give banks a vote for every home they assume ownership through foreclosure, or at least it would give fractional votes to all those investors who owned a slice of those mortgages that were sold by the banks and mortgage companies as collateralized debt obligations. Sounds like the RIGHT idea to me.

That Tea Party sure has some great thinkers, don’t it?

From the president’s press statement after meeting with congressional leaders (via email):

Now, none of this is going to be easy. We have two parties for a reason. There are real philosophical differences -– deeply held principles to which each party holds. And although the atmosphere in today’s meeting was extremely civil, there’s no doubt that those differences are going to remain no matter how many meetings we have. And the truth is there’s always going to be a political incentive against working together, particularly in the current hyperpartisan climate. There are always those who argue that the best strategy is simply to try to defeat your opposition instead of working with them.

And, frankly, even the notion of bipartisanship itself has gotten caught up in this mentality. A lot of times coming out of these meetings, both sides claim they want to work together, but try to paint the opponent as unyielding and unwilling to cooperate. Both sides come to the table; they read their talking points; then they head out to the microphones -– trying to win the news cycle instead of solving problems, and it becomes just another move in an old Washington game.

But I think there was recognition today that that’s a game that we can’t afford. Not in these times. And in a private meeting that I had without staff — without betraying any confidences — I was pleased to see several of my friends in the room say, let’s try not to duplicate that. Let’s not try to work the Washington spin cycle to suggest that somehow the other side is not being cooperative. I think that there was a sincere effort on the part of everybody involved to actually commit to work together to try to deal with these problems.

And they understand that these aren’t times for us to be playing games.

Here’s the thing. They are not sincere; they don’t want to work together; they don’t even know what language you are speaking when you say there are times you ought not be playing games. They want to destroy you.

This needs to be the last time the president pretends that he has any friends across the aisle.

Americans rarely save enough money for retirement, but you know who tries really hard? The unemployed. That’s right. Unemployed people try to save as much of their unemployment checks as possible. People making $200,000 a year? They’re tapped out on that Lexus lease. So, all we have to do to raise the national saving rate is to keep increasing unemployment and providing generous unemployment benefits. Also, too, job creators create jobs.

Here’s something funny. Only eight Republicans had the courage to vote against Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) amendment to the Food Safety bill that would have imposed a two-year moratorium on federal earmarks in the Senate: Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and retiring senators Bob Bennett of Utah and George Voinovich of Ohio. Obviously, Olympia Snowe is feeling the heat below the teapot up in Maine. Meanwhile, twenty-seven Republican senators failed to vote in favor of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which has now passed both houses of Congress and will move to Conference.

The bill, which President Obama supports, still needs to be reconciled with differing provisions in legislation passed by the House in July 2009.

But the Senate’s approval, by a 73-25 margin, was cheered by food safety experts and advocacy groups as a sign that the long delay could be nearing an end and the nation’s food-safety laws will receive their first major overhaul in decades.

The Food Safety and Modernization Act would require improved planning and record-keeping by food producers and would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to recall contaminated food under its own authority, instead of relying on industry cooperation.

“Today’s vote will finally give the FDA the tools it needs to help ensure that the food on dinner tables and store shelves is safe,” Richard Durbin, D-Ill, the bill’s primary sponsor, said in a statement.

Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, called it a “paradigm shift for the FDA.”

“It moves the agency from reacting to outbreaks and recalls to preventing them,” he said.

It’s a wonder we’re not all dead:

“It’s shocking to think that the last comprehensive overhaul of the food-safety system was in 1938,” Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who heads the health committee, said in debating the legislation this month. “Food safety has too often become a hit-or-miss gamble. That is frightening, and it’s unacceptable.”

This isn’t the bill progressive agriculture and food-safety experts would have produced. It has enough concessions in it that it won the unanimous support of Republicans on the HELP Committee. Having said that, it is a landmark piece of legislation that is probably several decades overdue. And most Republicans still managed to vote against the safety of our food. I mean, think about that:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) FDA Food Safety Modernization Act today, saying it will “improve America’s ability to prevent food borne illness and boost consumer confidence in U.S. food supplies while minimally burdening small farms and consumers.”

“This legislation would improve food safety by requiring all food manufacturers to develop a food safety plan, providing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with new tools to ensure the safety of imported food, and employing a rational, risk-based approach to inspection,” wrote R. Bruce Josten, Executive Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce. “On this basis alone the Chamber supports final passage of the bill.”

But the president is going to sign it, so who cares whether the Chamber of Commerce supports it? Any good Republican must oppose.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell co-wrote a piece for the Washington Post this morning, entitled “Where we and Democrats can work together.” I thought the piece was going to refer to areas of possible of cooperation in the next Congress, but it turned out that the piece only addresses the current lame-duck session of Congress. This might not surprise you, but there are only two areas where the Republicans and the Democrats can work together in the lame-duck session.

If President Obama and Democratic leaders put forward a plan during the lame-duck session to cut spending and stop the tax hikes on all Americans, they can count on a positive response from Republicans. If the president and Democratic leaders don’t act before the end of the year, however, House and Senate Republicans will work to get the job done in the new Congress. But we hope it doesn’t come to that.

In other words, the Republicans are not interested in passing a food safety bill or ratifying the New START Treaty, or extending unemployment insurance, of passing the Defense Authorization Act, or doing anything except extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and slashing government programs.

I hope John and Mitch have a nice time at the White House today.

Sometimes, Al Gore really is fat.

LIEBERMAN: Incidentally, I heard last night, I was watching CNN and Joe Jones was on and he was doing the 10 o’clock news show and he said that CNN had been offered these documents by Wikileaks or a third party, but had turned it down because they refused to sign a pledge granting the source anonymity, which the Times did. And I give CNN and whoever else turned it down credit for doing that. The New York Times’ hands are dirty in this and they should have said ‘no.’

IMUS: I hate CNN and I wish you hadn’t brought that up.

LIEBERMAN: I’m sorry about that! It just happened. But of course, really, Fox Business is my favorite and Fox generally, anything Rupert Murdoch owns.

Mind you, Lieberman said this on the Don Imus Show. Don Imus of nappy-headed hos fame. Sometimes I am glad for the butterfly ballot. Without it, we’d probably be complaining about President Lieberman’s excellent war right now.

Crossposted from European Tribune, also on Daily Kos

Meet Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez, better known as MAFO, Spain’s Central Banker.

Ordóñez urge la reforma de las pensiones para calmar a los mercados · ELPAÍS.com

[Spain’s Central Banker Miguel Ángel Fernández] Ordóñez urges pension reform to calm markets – ElPais.com

Insistió en la receta para recortar gastos y salir del túnel: “La reforma de las pensiones es capital y urgente; es una de las claves para tranquilizar a los mercados financieros”. Como velada crítica al nuevo ministro de Trabajo, pidió que se lleve a cabo “de manera inmediata” y que “su contenido sea suficientemente ambicioso”. En las respuestas a los políticos, explicó: “No haber recortado las pensiones cuando se ha recortado todo, es una concesión bastante importante” a los jubilados. Pidió que se eleve la edad de jubilación, el mínimo de años necesario para tener prestación y el periodo de cálculo de la pensión. UGT acusó a Ordóñez de generar “incertidumbre” sobre la solvencia de España.

He insisted on the recipe to cut expenditures and get out of the tunnel: “Pension reform is key and urgent; it is one of the keys to calm down the financial markets”. As a veiled criticism of the new Labour Minister, he asked that it be carried out “immediately” and that “its content be sufficiently ambitious”. In the answers to politicians, explicó: “not cutting pensions when everything else has been cut, is a very important concession” to retirees. He asked that the retirement age, the minimum number of years [worked] needed to get a benefit, and the period of [years esed for the] calculation of the pension, be raised. [Socialist union] UGT accused Ordóñes of generating “uncertainty” about Spain’s solvency.

With whom exactly, does MAFO’s loyalty lie?

Under certain interpretations of central banking, for instance that of Hyman Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, it would be the job of the Central Bank to “calm down the markets” by judicious use of open market operations. Instead, he tells the government in no uncertain terms that unless pensions are “reformed” market attacks on Spain’s debt won’t abate.
Here’s what Willem Buiter, whom I consider one of the leading economists of our time when it comes to understanding central banking, had to say 18 months ago:

Maverecon (FT.com): What’s left of central bank independence? (May 5, 2009)

Stick to your knitting and don’t get too close

It is a mistake for central bankers to express, in their official capacities, views on what they consider to be necessary or desirable fiscal and structural reforms. Examples are social security reform and the minimum wage, subjects on which Alan Greenspan liked to pontificate when he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and Ben Bernanke’s tendency to lecture on everything, from equality and opportunity to teenage pregnancy. It is not the job of any central banker to lecture, in an official capacity, the minister of finance on fiscal sustainability and budgetary restraint, or to hector the minister of the economy on the need for structural reform of factor markets, product markets and financial markets. This is not part of the mandate of central banks and it is not part of their areas of professional competence.

…

President Trichet of the ECB is already so far down the road of telling governments what to do and what not to do in the fiscal and structural reform domains, that one is hardly surprised by yet another lecture on budgetary policy from the Eurotower.  Traditionally, continental European central bankers speak very little about monetary policy in public, and are often unwilling to engage in public debate or answer questions about their monetary duties, but carry on endlessly about budgetary and structural reform matters.  It’s always easier to speak about things you have no responsibility for, that are not part of your mandate and about which you probably don’t know very much.

…

Independent central bankers can, and where possible should, cooperate with and coordinate their actions with those of the fiscal authorities and with those charged with structural reform. If central banks, Treasury ministers and ministers of the Economy were to act cooperatively toward each other, and with credible commitment towards the private sector, good things may well happen. The reason this does not happen in the EU, or even in the Euro Area, is not a question of principle, but of logistics. There is no coordinated fiscal policy in the EU or in the Eurozone, so the pursuit of coordination between fiscal and monetary policy in the EU or in the Eurozone is simply not possible. Mr. Jean-Claude Junker could have private breakfasts and/or public lunches with Mr Jean-Claude Trichet every day of the week, every week of the year, it would not bring monetary and fiscal policy coordination in the Eurozone an inch closer to realisation.

Anyway, MAFO’s comments come the day after it is revealed that Spain’s Central Bank basically botched a regulatory intervention in one of Spain’s Cajas de ahorros. Remember when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch and 3 months later they discovered Merrill had a hole big enough to bring down BofA, so BofA attempted to get out of the deal (as was their right under the merger agreement) and Paulson and Bernanke brought the CEO of BofA to a basement and beat him with a rubber hose until he agreed to proceed with the merger?

Well, it appears (ElPais.com, see Google translation) after Spanish Caja BBK agreed (greased by €400 million from Spain’s emergency restructuring fund, the FROB) to acquire the intervened Caja Cajasur before the summer, on the assumption that it had €200 million in losses up to June; now, 5 months later, it is revealed that the losses to August were €850 million. Should BBK now back out of the merger given than the losses are twice the amount of money the FROB is contributing, and over 4 times the amount at the time BBK agreed to the merger? The currently fashionable forced merger strategy to deal with bank insolvencies does nothing to share the burden with unsecured creditors, almost always costs more than intended, and encourages concentration in banking making the TBTF problem only worse.

But of course, it’s easier and more fun for a central banker to lecture the government about pensions and undermine market confidence in public solvency, than it is to do one’s job as banking regulator properly.

If Der Spiegel’s take on WikiLeaks’ document dump were to permeate down into the public’s grey matter, I might count the leaks as a good thing.

On the whole, the cables from the Middle East expose the superpower’s weaknesses. Washington has always viewed it as vital to its survival to secure its share of energy reserves, but the world power is often quickly reduced to becoming a plaything of diverse interests. And it is drawn into the animosities between Arabs and Israelis, Shiites and Sunnis, between Islamists and secularists, between despots and kings. Often enough, the lesson of the documents that have now been obtained, is that the Arab leaders use their friends in Washington to expand their own positions of power.

But, the press will get this whole thing cleaned up soon, once they’re done sensationalizing the embarrassment its done to America’s reputation and standing in the world. It’s doubtful that the public will learn anything lasting that changes how our politicians pull our strings. Unfortunately, I have to view these leaks as more damaging than helpful. They undermine our diplomatic efforts more than anything else, and I would prefer our diplomatic efforts be strengthened.

I enjoy the fly-on-the-wall aspects of the leaks, and I personally am grateful to have valuable information to help inform my worldview. But I think leaks of this type shouldn’t be done in some wholesale manner. They should be aimed at educating the public about specific areas where they are being misled. This dump was not selective. It wasn’t done to serve the public, although the public can benefit from some of the information. It appears to have been a clear effort to embarrass the United States and complicate our relations with allies and foes alike.

I can’t characterize this as a whistleblower situation, even if there are examples in such a large sample that would merit that designation if divulged by themselves. Do we need the world to know stuff like this?

Another reports that the wife of Azerbaijan leader Ilham Aliyev has had so much plastic surgery that it is possible to confuse her for one of her daughters from a distance, but that she can barely still move her face.

Did the President tell the American public that the First Lady of Azerbaijan could move her face? Where’s the whistleblowing element to this release? And don’t think it doesn’t matter.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emissaries also learn of a special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku who reports on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari allegedly got into a heated argument with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.

I don’t think Der Spiegel is in a position to know if that disclosure provided enough information to Iran for them to close down our “Iran observer” in Baku. And who knows whether or not our access to that source could be diminished simply because the president doesn’t like to see his wife insulted in print. Less strange things happen in foreign relations all the time. If we’re going to put stress on our foreign relationships and test our spies’ tradecraft, we ought to have something of equal or greater value to the American public to offset that. This release wasn’t discriminating in that regard, and I share the official outrage about how this was done.

There was a time when people like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and George H.W. Bush represented the right-wing of the foreign policy Establishment. Yeah, sure, there were plenty of citizens to their right in the John Birch Society or various anti-communist organizations. There were generals/politicians like George Wallace’s running mate Curtis LeMay who never saw a problem that couldn’t be nuked. Some people saw Nixon and Kissinger as savvy “realists” who were able to navigate a middle path between the more pacifist elements of the left-wing and the more fever-brained emotionalism of their base. In fact, most of the National Security Council over the last thirty-five years has been made up of Kissinger-apprentices, regardless of what party they’ve served. You could almost say that Nixon and Kissinger provided a framework that has persevered since Ford left office, and which has formed the based for what we consider ‘normal’ American foreign policy.

It’s a policy that I, and most of the left, have found wanting, but it’s familiar, like an old baseball mitt. Prior to 9/11 few people questioned why we periodically ramped up to invade a Grenada or a Panama, or why we were expanding NATO eastward, or why new American bases were cropping up in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia. Those of us who opposed these policies (or, in the case of NATO, questioned them) were definitely in the minority within a Democratic Party Establishment that was operating on Kissingerian terms.

So much has changed. The New START Treaty that the Obama administration has negotiated is being opposed by the Senate Republicans, and therefore will probably not be ratified. Yet, the GOP foreign policy Establishment supports it, as was evident when Obama recently discussed the treaty with the press.

More interesting than the comments, though, were the three men flanking the president at the time: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger, all veterans of modern Republican presidents, and members in good standing of Republican Foreign Policy Elder Statesmen, at least by the standards of the Republican establishment.

The point Obama and his team wanted to emphasize, of course, is that this treaty enjoys broad bipartisan support, just so long as one overlooks the Senate Republican caucus. It didn’t matter; the GOP votes that count are the ones that refuse to even consider the consequences of their conduct.

No one questions that the leader of the GOP foreign policy Establishment in the Senate is Richard Lugar of Indiana. He serves as the Ranking Member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he has been a true leader on the critical issues related to securing nuclear materials in a post-Soviet world. Here’s Lugar talking to his colleagues:

LUGAR: Please do your duty for your country. We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We’re not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We’re not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us. I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads…could demolish my city of Indianapolis — obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I’ve not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us.

But his colleagues either disagree that it is their duty to safeguard the country against nuclear attack and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials, or they have some higher priority than their duty. We might expect the opposition party to be a little reluctant to hand the president a foreign policy accomplishment that he can put in his cap, but we’re talking about nukes here. Isn’t there a certain point where politics ends and the interests of the country begin?

This isn’t being held up as some bargaining chip. There is no clearly articulated ideological opposition to the treaty. But, evidently, the old foreign policy Establishment has no pull, no credibility, with the current breed of Republican senator.

I’ve been saying that these folks are worse than anything we’ve ever seen before. This is just proof of it in one area. But it’s just as true in every other area.