Month: April 2014

Commenter Steggles asked me to respond to a passage in Elizabeth Warren’s new book: A Fighting Chance. It involves a dinner Warren had with Larry Summers in the spring of 2009. Here it is:

A telling anecdote involves a dinner that Ms. Warren had with Lawrence H. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. The dinner took place in the spring of 2009, after the oversight panel had produced its third report, concluding that American taxpayers were at far greater risk to losses in TARP than the Treasury had let on.

After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

“I had been warned,” Ms. Warren concluded.

Most of the attention paid to this passage has focused on the last part of what Summers said. The idea that insiders don’t criticize insiders comes across as a rebuke of Warren for daring to criticize the Treasury Department. If people are afraid to give their honest analysis for fear of contradicting some other arm of the government, that’s a problem.

But, that doesn’t mean that the first part of Summers’ comment wasn’t true and important. If you want to have a real impact on policy, you have to be an insider or, at least, gain the insiders’ trust. You can stay on the outside and lob bombs at everyone but that will have minimal effectiveness. Sen. Warren seems to have gotten the message. She’s the senior senator from Massachusetts now, and she is in a position to impact policy. Other insiders have to listen to her. I’m glad she seems to have disregarded the part of Summers argument that was stupid and to have accepted the part that was wise.

This is an example for progressives everywhere.

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Ynet Op-Ed: Israel occupied by the settlement lobby

(Ynet News) Apr. 29, 2014 – The right-wing parties ruled the state throughout most of this period. The right could have annexed the territories to Israel – Hebron and Bethlehem, which are holy to us, and Gaza and Ramallah, which are less holy – but preferred to hold on to the territories in the capacity of an occupier, under military rule. The sovereign authority in the West Bank is not the Knesset, but the GOC Central Command, by virtue of military authority. He and his officers, he and his soldiers. From now on we must say that the occupation was the choice of the rightwing.

I am not worried about the Palestinians. They have a president and a government whose job it is to care for them, an organization that speaks on their behalf, and a slew of patrons in Europe, in America and even in one daily newspaper in Israel. I would like to speak on behalf of another population groaning under an occupation – the Israelis.

The nine months of the failed negotiations will prove it. In the past few days, we have been living under the impression that Mahmoud Abbas is to blame for everything. This is the narrative dictated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and conveniently adopted by Ministers Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid.

In the service of the occupation army

Abbas did make a considerable contribution to the failure, there’s no doubt. But only the most absentminded politicians could ignore the huge contribution of the settler lobby to that failure, beginning with the veto imposed by the Bayit Yehudi party on a settlement construction freeze during negotiations.

It continued with the repeated announcements made by Housing Minister Uri Ariel on their behalf, about new construction plans beyond the Green Line, every time the negotiations showed signs of life. Ariel sabotaged, undermined and detonated, and Netanyahu didn’t dare touch him. It was Ariel who promised as many as 14,000 housing units to be built by the Netanyahu government in the territories during negotiations.

At a certain stage, Netanyahu explained to the world that Abbas was prepared to accept the settlement construction plans. The man was presented as a traitor in the eyes of his political world and in the eyes of the Palestinian street. His trust in Netanyahu was lost for good. And then came another declaration from Ariel, about a major construction plan in the Gilo neighborhood, and Abbas ended his partnership with the Americans too.

The pro-settlement political lobby represents a small minority. It is radical and reckless, not just in the eyes of most Israelis, but in the eyes of a large proportion of the Israelis living beyond the Green Line as well. Nonetheless, it controls the government, which it extorts financially and neutralizes politically. It has the right to veto every move and every initiative.

When Netanyahu is threatened by Bennett, he takes shelter not in the center of the political map but on its radical margins, alongside Uri Ariel. There is not a single element in the world, including Swaziland, which accepts the dictats of the settlement lobby.

This lobby will shape the face of Israel in two stages. In the first stage it will become an apartheid state, boycotted by business groups in the world, besieged politically, legally and culturally. Israeli businesspeople are already feeling this cold wind. In the second stage, the world will force Israel to become a binational state, a state of all its citizens.

When this scenario is presented to the settler lobbyists, they say it won’t happen, G*d will intervene. One bright day the Palestinians will disappear. Unfortunately for them, that’s highly unlikely.

Israel Lands: Privatization or National Ownership – Jews Only

○ Kerry Says the “A-word” and Abbas says the “H-Word”
○ Jewish National Fund’s Iconic Blue Box Sends One-State Message
○ Kahanists don’t need to be terrorists anymore, since the State [of Israel] has become them

My recent diaries:
○ Obama’s Middle-East Policy In A Holding Pattern
○ Peace In Palestine Between Hamas and PA of Fatah
○ U.S. Congress and the Zionist Dream; Chas. Freeman and the WH Cabal

I’ll have much more to say about Sasha Issenberg’s opus on the Democrats’ midterm turnout strategy when I have some time to write about it. I think I will be returning to it repeatedly throughout the year.

Right now, I only have time to give a teaser and my first impression. I will bet my right arm that the Democrats’ approach will work much better than a traditional advertising-heavy campaign. As a veteran door-knocker and community organizer, I may be biased against the media consultant types and the academic “framer” types, but everything I’ve learned in the field leads me to believe that the best way to create a new voter is to talk to them in person. If you can’t talk to them in person, then talk to them on the phone. If you can’t get them on the phone, talk to their best friends. And if you can’t do that, send them highly-targeted mail.

And, here’s the thing. The most important asset a political campaign can have is volunteers who live in the district or neighborhood in which they will be canvassing. Mobilizing the base is largely about mobilizing the politically active to do more than vote. You need them to work, preferably for free. So, contra Issenberg, I don’t think the Democrats’ more populist agenda items are aimed solely at winning over soft Republicans. Highlighting the War on Women and fighting to raise the minimum wage can win over soft Republicans while raising the morale and enthusiasm of the base at the same time.

The main thing is that the Democrats’ new strategy is based on social science, not wishful thinking. It should work precisely because it has been demonstrated to work. Attack ads have been shown to have a short half-life, so running them in the spring is a stupid idea and an almost complete waste of money. Unless you get them to go viral (in a good way) on the internet, they’re horribly inefficient at reaching the voters you want to reach.

The midterms will be fought by two teams with much different playbooks. Our playbook is better.

The words “apartheid” and “Israel” keep coming up in relation to each other, and people keep saying that it isn’t helpful at all. I don’t know whether it is helpful or not, but there’s a reason that it keeps happening. Whether the comparison is made by Ehud Barak, Jimmy Carter, or John Kerry, it always means the same thing. If the people living in Gaza and the West Bank don’t gain some kind of political independence including the right to both elect their leaders and have those leaders free to implement their policies, then they will be in a situation similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa prior to the end of the Afrikaner regime. People talk about a two-state solution for a reason. If there is only one state, that state is going to be Israel. And Israel allows Arabs to have citizenship and to vote, but they will never allow West Bank and Gazan Arabs to vote.

What I think is unhelpful is to keep trying to make people shut up about apartheid. Either Israel wants to govern all of Palestine as an apartheid state or they don’t. If they don’t, then they should stop dithering about a two-state solution. They should also stop using Hamas as an excuse not to negotiate. It’s better for Hamas and Fatah to be working together because that means that they have the capability of making concessions that the other side will keep. Endlessly repeating that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel precludes the possibility that Hamas might change its mind about that.

The left should be grateful to Bill Clinton for ending 12 years of Republican occupation of the White House, and for managing to get reelected. A fair assessment of his administration should take into account what didn’t happen simply because he won (twice), as well as what he accomplished legislatively and from a policy perspective. Yet, the party he bequeathed to the left was wanting in many respects. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate, who went on to endorse George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. In 2000, the party was dominated by New Democrats from the Democratic Leadership Council wing. This was not a party well-suited to deal with the radical opposition, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was also a party that had lost its populist instincts and had deregulated the financial sector. It was incapable of effectively resisting the Bush tax cuts or stopping bankruptcy reform.

The liberal blogosphere arose in a vacuum to assert leftist values that the Democratic Party had abandoned or lacked the courage to defend. So, it’s somewhat disconcerting that Hillary Clinton has emerged as a consensus choice of Democrats, more than 80% of whom want her to run to be the next nominee of the party. You would think that the party would be more forward-looking in its approach.

But, it’s not. It just isn’t. And as much as the right might want Elizabeth Warren to run, it probably won’t happen. The right has deep fissures that they won’t be able to hide during their primaries, but Democrats seem content to sweep their differences under the rug.

There is a real strength in Democrats’ unity. In fact, Hillary Clinton may wind up winning the support of Wall Street Republicans and possibly even neo-conservative Republicans. If the left remains content with her and doesn’t pull her significantly out of the center, she might be able to take advantage of an out-of-the-mainstream Republican opponent to win an election by a Nixon-McGovern or Reagan-Mondale margin.

If you think I’m not serious, consider this:

Two dozen interviews about the 2016 race with unaligned GOP donors, financial executives and their Washington lobbyists turned up a consistent — and unusual — consolation candidate if Bush demurs, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t recover politically and no other establishment favorite gets nominated: Hillary Clinton…

…The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.

“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”

The knee-jerk reaction to this is that Clinton is the friend of our enemies and must be an enemy herself. But it is at least as possible that it is the fat cats who are making the mistake. They are assuming that a Hillary presidency would be like a Bill presidency, but that is not a safe assumption at all.

For starters, they are obviously different people whose agenda may not be identical. But, more than this, Bill Clinton’s presidency was constrained by the concurrent Gingrich Revolution in Congress. Had Clinton enjoyed strong majorities in Congress he, like Obama, would have had a more progressive record than he wound up having. Hillary Clinton may have more pro-business instincts and support than other possible nominees, but it’s actually the size of her victory (and whether or not she has significant coattails) that will most determine the ideological nature of her prospective presidency. During President Obama’s first two years in office, he had strong majorities and he rattled off more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson. The next four years haven’t been anywhere near as productive, but it’s not because the president has changed his worldview. His opponents now have the power to block him, and that’s the only thing that has changed and the main thing that matters.

Without more Democrats in office, no president, no matter how far to the left of Obama they might be, could accomplish much. This is a conundrum for the left because they want a standard-bearer who will trumpet their values, but they also want someone who is effective. There’s a big difference between the president who created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the president who repealed Glass-Stegall. Where would Hillary Clinton land along that continuum?

I have never seen a candidate enter a presidential contest with more leeway than Hillary. She has the left wrapped up in her hip pocket and is on the verge of winning over the financial sector and the foreign policy elite on the right.

Much as I might want a strong leftward challenge, there isn’t any such challenge on the horizon, unless you think Bernie Sanders will get some actual traction. The tension lies between the advantage of locking Hillary into promises to the left and the advantage of her enjoying the maximal possible victory with the most coattails.

She looked strong in 2007, but nothing like this. She is a colossus and, with over 80% Democrats already on her side, she can do pretty much what she wants.

Half the time I wonder if all our effort over twelve years amounted to nothing, and half the time I feel like we’re on the cusp of finally crushing the conservative movement for good.

It’s a slow news day, so I thought I’d put a little Elizabeth Warren to music:

“I’m worried the power in the financial services industry. I’m worried about the fact that cops were taken off the beat in financial services, and that these guys were allowed to paint a bull’s eye on the backs of American families,” Warren said of banking industry executives. “They crashed the economy, and then they got bailed out.”

“And what bothers me now is they still strut around Washington, they block regulations they don’t want and roll over agencies whenever they can,” Warren added.

She went on to say it will continue to be a central issue for her during her time in the Senate, but wouldn’t say if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions toward banking executives would determine whether or not Warren backs her in 2016.

I know I feel better. How about you?

I have a theory that Sarah Palin has the intent to humiliate John McCain as often as possible. Maybe it’s because McCain wouldn’t let her give her own concession speech. Maybe it’s some of the things McCain’s advisers have said about her. Or, maybe, it’s just a joke the gods are playing on McCain for being so stupid in his choice of running mate:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) defended the controversial enhanced interrogation technique of waterboarding this weekend, and implied that the practice would still be commonplace “if I were in charge.”

“They obviously have information on plots to carry out Jihad,” she said at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual meeting on Saturday evening, referring to prisoners. “Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

The best part is that McCain won’t allow himself to react to this because he can’t admit the magnitude of his mistake.

I wish the National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy would stop to consider the implications of his own words. As he acknowledges, under The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, possession of 5 grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine were treated the same way: a mandatory prison sentence of five years was imposed. Now, consider the practical difference. A group of white suburban teenagers might purchase an “eight-ball” of coke to have some fun on a Saturday night. Possession of two eight-balls would be equal to possession of seven grams of powder cocaine. In other words, someone who brought a slightly more than average amount of coke to a party would have been subject to a five-year sentence if powder cocaine had been treated the way that crack was. Looked at another way, possession of five grams of crack was not a true indicator that someone was a a significant narcotics dealer, or a dealer at all. A crack addict might buy five or more grams at a time for simple convenience, or because they were buying some for their friends, too. So, the disparity wasn’t just that crack-dealing and coke-dealing were treated differently, but that the crack sentences netted a lot of people who were mere addicts or, at worst, couriers. Casual users of cocaine did not commonly possess 500 grams of it at any one time. Casual users of crack often possessed 5 grams at one time.

That’s why the following is so myopic:

Holder carefully talks about “non-violent” drug “offenders.” Obama riffs about “kids or individual users” supposedly “lock[ed] up . . . for long stretches of jail time.” You are left to imagine poor addicts who never hurt anyone but themselves, languishing for decades in some super-max prison. Yet federal drug enforcement targets felony drug dealers, not simple possession of drugs — the latter is left to the states. Mere users of marijuana and crack are not wasting away in federal penitentiaries. Moreover, an offender sentenced under a mandatory-minimum provision has necessarily committed a significant narcotics felony; the felony distribution of minor amounts of narcotics is not subject to a mandatory minimum, and judges maintain discretion to sentence those offenders to little or no jail time. Obama and Holder are talking about freeing what could amount to thousands of serious criminals.

Again, five grams of crack is a minor amount of narcotics, which is largely the point. McCarthy also dismisses the whole notion of “disparate impact” since white crack dealers were treated the same as black crack dealers. In addition to the fact that even this isn’t true, it is impossible to imagine that white suburban parents would have tolerated seeing their college-bound sons and daughters sentenced to five years in prison over possession of a couple of eight-balls. They call blacks a racial minority for a reason. They make up less than 20% of the population, and they are therefore less capable of using their political weight to change laws they find outrageous. White parents could live with sentencing guidelines that only impacted folks who possessed 500 grams of coke. They didn’t know any one like that, and those people were serious drug dealers. Black folks didn’t like the crack epidemic and would have supported tough sentencing for serious crack pushers. But that’s not what existed.

Andrew McCarthy says that President Obama is subverting the law by soliciting applications for commutation from people who received too-harsh sentences, but he doesn’t understand that too-harsh sentences actually occurred on a regular basis.

Ian Morris, a professor of Classics at Stanford, argues in the Washington Post that, in the long run, wars make us safer and richer. Perhaps it is just too difficult to make such a counterintuitive argument within the limited space of an opinion column, but his piece is one big mess.

The essence of his point is that modern people are much less likely to die violent deaths (at the hands of other humans) than stone-age people were, and that the reason for this is because we have formed large societies. In order to form large societies, we needed to a long series of subjugations where the vanquished were not killed but brought into the conquerers’ system. To accomplish this, governments were formed with the primary job of pacifying their subjects through a variety of means, including law enforcement. Therefore, war and coercion are not the evils that they may seem to be at first consideration. He might have added religion to the mix here, but he didn’t.

One might ask why he wrote this column in the first place. Does he think we aren’t fighting enough wars? To get some idea of his motivation, you have to read to near the end, where he appears to compare the United States to the British Empire and suggest that we need to have the stomach to be the global sons of bitches the whole world needs us to be.

Like its predecessor, the United States oversaw a huge expansion of trade, intimidated other countries into not making wars that would disturb the world order, and drove rates of violent death even lower. But again like Britain, America made its money by helping trading partners become richer, above all China, which, since 2000, has looked increasingly like a potential rival. The cycle that Britain experienced may be in store for the United States as well, unless Washington embraces its role as the only possible globocop in an increasingly unstable world — a world with far deadlier weapons than Britain could have imagined a century ago.

American attitudes toward government are therefore not just some Beltway debate; they matter to everyone on Earth.

Why is this piece such a mess?

First, retracing the history of societal formation and noting that war and coercion were indispensable tools in those formations doesn’t obviously tell us anything about whether or not we can improve people’s safety or make them richer by using war and coercion today.

Even in his piece, Prof. Morris notes that war may not make societies bigger and stronger, even in the long term.

For 1,000 years — beginning before Attila the Hun in the AD 400s and ending after Genghis Khan in the 1200s — mounted invaders from the steppes actually threw the process of pacification into reverse everywhere from China to Europe, with war breaking down larger, safer societies into smaller, more dangerous ones.

In fact, he begins his piece by referencing a retrospectively naive book written in 1910 that predicted that war had become obsolete. But he doesn’t explain how World War One made people safer or richer.

I think we can see in places like Congo, Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq that the absence of sufficient force can make people less safe and much poorer. Perhaps the people in those countries would benefit if someone came along who was strong enough to subjugate all the warring factions and make them live peacefully together. But, of course, these theoretical strongmen would have to kill and threaten to kill a lot of people in order to accomplish their goals. And that would definitely not make people safer or richer in the short term.

To some degree, Prof. Morris seems to be arguing in favor of larger societies that use bigger governmental organizations because these bring more people together and protects them better than smaller societies with less coercive capability. He could have made an argument in favor of the nation-state as an innovation that brought more peace than war. But he chose to argue that war is, in itself, even in this day and age, a positive good. War is Peace, in other words.

And America needs to bring the peace.

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Obama brings curtain down on Mideast peace process

(Haaretz) –  U.S. President Barack Obama started bringing down the curtain on the American peace initiative spearheaded by his secretary of state, John Kerry, since last March. Obama did not formally wave the white flag, but his statements to the press make it clear that he thinks that currently, both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are not partners for peace.

Obama’s statements were neither planned nor orchestrated in advance. He was asked a question, and he answered honestly and directly that despite a year of supreme efforts by the American administration, both Netanyahu and Abbas were unwilling to show leadership. In Obama’s opinion, both figures, motivated by political survival, don’t want to make decisions which will begin to untie the Gordian knot called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The American president termed the new American policy toward the peace process as a “pause.” John Kerry called it a “transition to a holding period.” In simple English, the two gave the signal over the weekend for the American retreat from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Various officials in Washington are pressing Obama and Kerry to enter the “pause” only after the administration tables its principles for the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s core issues, including the issues of refugees and of Jerusalem. Kerry is toying with the idea, but Obama has no appetite for another adventure which will surely run into the brick wall of Netanyahu, Abbas and Co.

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No one will be surprised if sooner or later U.S. envoy Martin Indyk– who has become even more frustrated than his predecessor, George Mitchell– announces his resignation and returns to his previous job at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

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For the Palestinians, the implications will be a steep deterioration in economy and security. For the Israelis, the repercussions will include a worsening international isolation, increased calls for boycotts and even sanctions by the European Union and other bodies against the settlement enterprise. Tragically, it seems both sides need a crisis in order to get truly motivated to move forward.

In the coming days, Netanyahu will most likely continue his propaganda assault on Abbas and the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement. He has already taken over the Sunday television shows on American networks, and he probably won’t stop there.

What Palestinian Reconciliation Means for the Peace Process – April 2011

○ Wagging The Dog: 60 Years of US-Israeli Relations (2007)
○ Obama to warn Netanyahu: ‘No more blank cheques’  May 18, 2009
○ Hillary Clinton Using Netanyahu’s Vocabulary  Nov. 3, 2009
○ Obama In Bed with Israel and Neocons Feb. 9, 2012

In 2011 Hamas was riding high with support from Egypt’s President Morsi, the emir of Qatar, Turkey’s Erdogan (Muslim Brotherhood nations) and Secretary Hillary Clinton. In the meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood facade has collapsed and a new wind is blowing in the Middle-East under leadership of the Sunni Salafist and Wahhabist GCC states.

○ Israel and US question pact by Hamas and Fatah for unity government April 27, 2011
○ Samantha Power, the Monster, and the Libyan Intervention  Sept. 12, 2011
○ US Foreign Policy, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood Ploy  Oct. 13, 2012