Author: yastreblyansky

North Carolina’s GOP Senate candidate, Thom Tillis, showed up in the New York Times yesterday in a way that deserved a lot more attention than it seems likely to get, in a story about state regulation of personal installment loans, for emergency needs like car repairs or medical bills.

These are a kind of subprime loan offered by companies like the Citigroup unit OneMain Financial:

OneMain, which has 1.3 million customer accounts, offers its borrowers unsecured, installment loans with interest rates of up to 36 percent. Borrowers pay both interest and principal in monthly installments until the loan is paid off, usually within a few years. But many of its borrowers refinance their outstanding balance.

About 60 percent of OneMain’s loans are so-called renewals — a trend one analyst called “default masking” because borrowers may be able to refinance before they run into trouble paying back their current balance.

It looks like a technique for reducing people to quasi-permanent low-grade debt slavery, and it’s a problem, but to the bankers and their lobbyists the regulations need to be loosened so they can charge higher interest rates still, and they have succeeded in getting this done in some eight states over the past two years, as in the North Carolina case:

Under the previous law, lenders could charge 30 percent interest on loans up to $1,000 and 18 percent on a remaining balance of $6,500. The new law allows for rates of up to 30 percent on the first $4,000 of a loan and 24 percent on the next $4,000.

That’s seriously abusive usury, and the story makes clear that there’s no justification for it: the lending institutions were making spectacular profits on the laws as they were.

One population that suffers a lot from this kind of loan operation is our military personnel, who aren’t paid enough to support a family, which makes the loans a kind of big thing in, for instance, North Carolina, where eventually the top brass came out to oppose deregulation, in 2011:

Commanders from Fort Bragg, home of the Army’s Special Operations Forces, and Camp Lejeune, the Marine base, rarely come out so publicly to denounce a bill, some lawmakers said. But they made an exception for installment loans. One commander worried that “out-of-control debt” could jeopardize soldiers’ security clearances.

However, state legislators, including Tillis, were unable to hear these pleas, distracted by the clink of cash:

North Carolina lawmakers, meanwhile, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the consumer finance industry. Speaker Thom Tillis, who supported the bill in the House, was one of the biggest beneficiaries. Mr. Tillis, a Republican who is running for United States Senate, has received more money from the American Financial Services Association than any other Senate candidate, according to OpenSecrets.org.

The role of Tillis is only noted way down at the bottom of the story, as if the Times didn’t realize he’s a national figure now in the Glorious Battle for the Senate. And then it’s not every day that starts off with Ben Bradlee and Oscar de la Renta dying and then moves on to people getting shot dead in the parliament in Ottawa. And stories about credit regulation are pretty much as boring as it gets.

Nevertheless, it’s now clear Tillis cares more about bankers than he does about our troops, and that’s not even a slight exaggeration. And you can bet that his Democratic opponent Kay Hagan, however depressingly conservative she wants to present herself as being, would never vote for bullshit like that (her record on banking regulation and campaign contributions from banks is not all that beautiful, but it’s distinctly better than Tillis’s). I hope her campaign picks up on it.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

So Eric Schmitt in the Times informs us that Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, is barnstorming the ummah, working to get America’s Muslim youth off the path of terrorism.

His aim is to build partnerships between the federal government and the local law enforcement, educational and community groups that are better positioned to detect potential militants in their midst and to derail those young men and women from the path of radicalization before they turn violent.

These efforts have been underway since the Sept. 11 attacks, but have often failed to gain traction, government officials acknowledge.

Hm, I wonder why. Maybe we could get an idea from community leaders at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Dublin, Ohio, where Johnson was visiting last week, who

complained of humiliating border inspections by brusque federal agents, F.B.I. sting operations that wrongly targeted Muslim citizens as terrorists and a foreign policy that leaves President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in place as a magnet for extremists.

“Our relationship has to be built on trust, but the U.S. government hasn’t given us very many reasons to build up that trust,” said Omar Saqr, 25, the cultural center’s youth coordinator.

That remark about Assad shows that this is not a crowd that uniformly hates the projection of American military power (no doubt many do, but not all); what they have in common isn’t a political stance, or a theological stance either, but a dislike for being insulted, manhandled, delayed in their personal business, or imprisoned without charge, which is, I believe, how most people feel, regardless of religion.

The Times article tells us of all kinds of steps DHS is taking to deal with this problem, from building gyms to electronic surveillance, but it doesn’t have a word to say about the things the government might consider not doing. Like not subjecting people to this kind of mistreatment simply because they have Arabic names.

An opinion piece in today’s Times by Eric Lewis notes that the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are persons for certain purposes (or superpersons, since they now not only have individual rights such as religious freedom, but also retain rights, such as limited liability, that mere people don’t have), but detainees in Guantánamo, all of whom happen to be Muslims, aren’t persons under the Fifth Amendment–literally–as when it declined to hear the appeal of a case Lewis argued, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, 2008.

That just brings dehumanization to a whole new level. I realize there’s a reason for Americans to be frightened (there’s a reason to be frightened of hepatitis C, too, and rising sea levels, but nobody’s trampling anyone’s civil rights over that), but there’s such a thing as being too frightened: that’s what terrorism is aimed at, bringing your fear out to the point where it harms you. Looks like it worked.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Commenter Blueskies notes on my happy birthday President Carter post:

While Carter was a better president than many give him credit for, we should not forget, in addition to his efforts for middle east peace, his efforts against middle east peace. We are still living (and dying) with the consequences of some of these acts.

1. Not to be too pedantic, the story linked to is about Afghanistan, which is not in the Middle East. Nah, that really is too pedantic, sorry. Also, Googling around, I find there’s an aspect missing from the story, which is the correct apportionment of the blame between Carter and the CIA.
2. The link is to text from an interview of 1998 with Carter’s National Security Director, Zbigniew Brzezinski (the original French text is here), on the subject of how Carter is to blame for the growth of the Salafist jihadi movement and Osama Bin Laden because of the $500 million in nonlethal aid to Afghan insurgents he signed off on in July 1979 (which had been a secret until Bob Gates, who had been serving under Brzezinski at the time in the NSC staff, leaked it in his retired-celebrity memoir in 1996).

Brzezinski (at the time hawking his own 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he notably pushed the idea of rushing Ukraine into NATO as fast as possible, and I think we all know now what a terrific idea that was) makes a crucial error, in agreeing with the interviewer that the aid package was approved six months before the Soviet invasion took place, and could thus be said to have brought the invasion on. In fact, bits of invasion were already ongoing: a detachment of tanks, BMP vehicles, and troops to guard the officials and the major Kabul-area airports who arrived on June 17, and an airborne battalion on July 7 (four days after Carter signed that finding).

And rather than worrying about the Americans supplying insurgents far from the capital, the Soviets were especially afraid of a local civil war between their allies, prime minister Noor Taraki and his deputy Hafizullah Amin (whom they suspected, probably wrongly, of being in collusion with the US). So it was the Russian activities that brought on the US aid action, not the other way around: as the official State Department history sums it up,

By mid-1979 Moscow was searching to replace Taraki and Amin, and dispatched combat troops to Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul. This move prompted the Carter administration to begin supplying non-lethal aid to Afghan mujahedeen, or Islamic insurgents.

You need to understand that Brzezinski is jealous of the Reagan people who claim to have engineered the destruction of the USSR by luring them into an Afghanistan war; he’s not thinking about exposing wickedness in the Carter administration, he’s trying to claim some of the “credit”. But this was a war that was likely to happen regardless of what the US did.

Also, per that same State Department document, he likely doesn’t love Carter much–in internal administration squabbles, Carter tended to side with State against NSC in favor of working with the USSR rather than confronting it as Brzezinski always wished to do:

The Carter administration recognized that Taraki would undo Daoud’s attempt to steer Afghanistan away from Moscow, and it debated whether to cut ties with Afghanistan or recognize Taraki in the hopes that Soviet influence could be contained. Although the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated the former course, Carter supported the Department of State’s advocacy of recognition.

3. Speculatively, that is not as if I have any proper evidence, it looks as if the Carter policy, whatever Brzezinski may have thought, was simply to have a client through whom to exercise influence on the completely chaotic situation, all the more after Amin overthrew Taraki and had him murdered in October. And I imagine what State and Carter would have had in mind would be a client of the usual kind, that is a pre-certified “moderate” in the form of the beloved Tajik hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, whose murder in 2001 (probably at the hands of Qa’eda fighters) may have been the worst blow of all to hopes for a unified Afghanistan. And the money would not have had anything like a decisive military influence.

But whatever Carter’s and the State Department’s idea may have been, the CIA definitely had a different one, according to the later ambassador Peter Tomsen, whose book on the subject, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers, came out in 2011. According to Tomsen, the CIA, in cahoots with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, favored instead a fundamentalist Pashtun warlord, the unspeakable Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, concentrating the US aid on him, in direct contravention of official US policy, and helping in this way to create the original Salafist legions including “Arab Afghans” such as Osama Bin Laden.

The CIA quickly sent out an old spook, Charles Cogan, to deny Tomsen’s hypothesis in a book review in Foreign Policy (Cogan’s review is where I get my information about the book)–or rather to explain it away, because it couldn’t exactly be denied–which of course makes me morally certain it’s true. And it is true, anyway, as one Wikipedian writes.

The United States provided Massoud with close to no support. Part of the reason was that it permitted its funding and arms distribution to be administered by Pakistan, which favored the rival mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In an interview, Massoud said, “We thought the CIA knew everything. But they didn’t. They supported some bad people [meaning Hekmatyar].”

Carter won’t say it, even now, and it’s possible he can’t even think it, but the horrors in Afghanistan happened, literally, in spite of him, with the Carter-despising Agency playing a key role in the damage.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Promoted by Steven D.

Happy 90th birthday to President Jimmy Carter, greatest ex-president in the history of the United States! (With the possible exception of John Quincy Adams, who was not too proud to sit in the House of Representatives representing a Massachusetts district for the rest of his life after the presidency, 1831 to 1848, trying to put an end to slavery.)

Carter is maybe the only president who ever did anything directly personally for me, when he blanket-pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers, so I’m biased from the start, but I think his quality as a serving president is drastically undervalued by most on the left even as it is demonized at an Obama level by the right (who can never forgive his efforts against dictatorship and for Middle East peace). Last April, when his book A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power came out, David Masciotra at The Daily Beast summarized some of the progressive aspects of his term that are consistent with, not in opposition to, the values he’s shown since he left the White House, especially on the subject of environmental preservation, which has turned out to be the most crucial of all:

Keep reading below the fold …

As president, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt–a ceasefire still standing today. He made human rights central to American foreign policy by cutting off funding for dictatorial regimes running torture chambers. He directed U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to make opposing apartheid in South Africa central to his work…. He is the only president who has tried to start a national conversation about reducing our dependence on foreign oil through conservation and the use of alternative energy sources. And he spent four years as commander in chief of the world’s largest and most lethal military without dropping one bomb, launching one missile, or firing one shot.

Carter’s awkward leadership style often obscured his genuine accomplishments. For example, the tone of the infamous “malaise speech” (in which that word is never used) might have been unappealing, but its content, as historian Kevin Mattson makes clear in his excellent book What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?, was prescient and illustrated true leadership, as Carter challenged Americans to change their ways of thinking and living, so that they might become more prosperous, unified, and free. And there is no disputing that he brought peace to formerly violent parts of the world, advanced the agenda of human rights, and used the powers of his pulpit to start new and necessary conversations about American life and America’s role as superpower. For his trouble, the American people expelled him from office and replaced him with a man who sponsored death squads in Latin America, said ketchup was a vegetable, and in the words of Norman Mailer, “was shallow as spit on a rock.”

Since then, no president has spoken to the American people with so much candor, directness, and vision. And yet the public–apparently unable to decipher the clear lessons of history–continues to wonder why its leaders are consistently dishonest, obfuscating, and frivolous.

The bit I left out was about his passion for deregulation, which doesn’t fit the picture–although he denies strongly that he would have moved on to deregulating the finance industry in the second term that never came:

No, that’s not true. The elements that have resulted in the latest breakdown were done under a later president, I won’t call his name. We kept tight control over the banking and finance committee [transcription error for “community”?]. There was a constant monitoring of the loans to people. And in getting those loans and then selling those mortgages to other people, and indeed they would be resold again — all of that was prohibited when I went out of office. (Interview with Kai Ryssdal, October 2010)

And the list of industries he did deregulate includes beer, said to have made today’s craft breweries possible against the monopoly power of the horse-piss factories, so there’s even a bright spot there.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Promoted by Steven D.

You might not think it, but I do get embarrassed sometimes at how little I have to say that’s critical about President Obama. It’s partly because I’m so continually appalled at the attacks on him and their overtly racist character; as Melissa Harris-Perry was suggesting a few weeks ago, his presidency is in a lot of ways more important than he is himself. And then I’m not seeing a lot of practicable alternatives to his management, in the current situation in the United States, with a paralyzed legislature and a poisoned Supreme Court and a rotten and poorly informed political press and a rogue intelligence community that, I’m convinced, defies him; Obama is so much the least objectionable part of our establishment, and we ought to be trying to strengthen his hand against the rest of it.

Intellectually, though, he can be pretty ordinary or unimaginative (who can’t?), and this bit of analysis from Professor Cole on the situation in Iraq and Syria struck me as kind of important:

(Cont. reading below the fold)

At one point in the interview, Obama lays out what he thinks the underlying problems are:

“They have now created an environment in which young men are more concerned whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or whether they are able to, you know, have a good job. Many of them are poor. Many of them are illiterate and are therefore more subject to these kinds of ideological appeals. And, you know, the beginning of the solution for the entire Middle East is going to be a transformation in how these countries teach their youth. What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root.”

This point of view is just old-fashioned modernization theory, and I think it puts the cart before the horse. It depicts Iraqi and Syrian youth as putting sectarian considerations before ones of rational economic well-being. I don’t believe this is an accurate characterization of what has happened. That Obama sees these Arab young men as merely acting irrationally, and that he doesn’t seem to understand the profound crisis of joblessness behind the turmoil, helps explain why ISIL surprised him and his intelligence officials.

Obama seems guilty of some old-fashioned Orientalism here.

If he really believes (as I’m afraid Clinton did in his views on the South Slavic states) in illiterate young people giving in to “ancient hatreds” as the problem in the Middle East, he needs to stop reading Friedman and start reading Cole. The biggest problem in Iraq and Syria is the economic destruction together with the surfeit of armaments, both wrought by the 2003 invasion.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names

Molly Redden at Mother Jones (via Kilgore) has the real scoop on why US local police forces are acquiring all that ridiculous heavy weaponry and those MRAPs. It’s a bureaucratic boondoggle!

According to interviews with state officials running point between the Pentagon and police, the Defense Department prefers to leave equipment in circulation whenever possible. “It’s a low-cost storage method for them,” says Robb Davis, the mayor pro tem of Davis. His town is trying to shake its MRAP. “They’re dumping these vehicles on us and saying, ‘Hey, these are still ours, but you have to maintain them for us.'”

Police departments, in most cases, bear the costs of shipping the equipment to its new home. Making things more difficult, as the Defense Department reevaluates the program this fall, the agency temporarily closed the portion of its website that allows police departments to request returns.

Eula Biss (author of On Immunity: An Inoculation) on NPR:

There’s a great blog, Science-Based Medicine — and one of the writers on that blog pointed out that when you split the difference between information and misinformation, you still end up with misinformation. So I think there are situations where a middle ground is not desirable. Though I’m the kind of thinker who’s very drawn to compromises and to nuances…

Cross-posted as The Rectification of Names

Carly Fiorina is the Dr. Ben Carson of gender.

Guardian, last Tuesday:

The first strikes landed just after 2am, directed at sites that Islamic State (Isis) has openly used and that had long been flagged as targets. The jihadis were no longer there though, having blended in with Raqqa’s civilian population, where they knew they would be safer.

I noticed some folks–well, Dr. Turk, of whom I’m a long-time fan–making fun of the allies for blowing up buildings and letting the enemy get away, but it occurred to me that could work as a good, if unconventional idea: Don’t kill people (who include civilians), kill infrastructure. Not the way they did it in old Mr. Rumsfeld’s day, of course, but.

By daybreak, the governorate building, an Isis command post for the past 15 months, a TV station and a Syrian military base had been destroyed. According to several residents who spoke to the Guardian, up to 30 people were killed. Most, if not all, were militants.

But that. They messed up significant parts of the Daesh’s ability to function, but the Guardian couldn’t find any evidence of a civilian getting killed, and they did ask around. That’s not a bad thing.

One of the greatest things about Boo as a writer is what he does with the very-short form, just pulling the guts out of an issue with a couple of sentences and laying it out for the Pond and often as not sparking a fantastic conversation. It’s hard!