I was holding a bunch of Friday Night suggestions from a liberal drinker in reserve, but the first few I checked either had embedding disabled or had been pulled down. My wife suggested this song, from the Obama Inaugural Concert. It doesn’t top the Pete Seeger clip, but it’s right behind it.
Greg Palast seems to think that Obama played the Republicans just right:
Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn’t give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as “tax refunds,” and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.
Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin’ man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a “we’re all post-partisan friends” BS.
And it’s about time.
It is about time, if that’s what’s going on. All this should become much clearer over the course of the next few weeks.
The Town of Preston is about to lose control of the former Norwich Hospital site. Both the state and Preston went about marketing the property in a back asswards way. The site needs to be cleaned up. The state should clean it up and then market it, if market it they must. They’d be likely to attract serious people, instead of scam artists like Joe Gentile.
A better idea, of which I was reminded today by an email from a frequent commenter on this site, is to turn the property to an educational use. It’s a beautiful piece of property, and would make a first rate campus for an educational institution. He suggests that we develop a first rate technical school, in the MIT mold. Why not? We already have two high quality small colleges here. We have the Pfizer research facilities. A technical/research institution would fit right in and could be just the catalyst we need to diversify the local economy. Of course this is whistling in the wind. Preston had just enough sense to avoid being ensnared by Joe Gentile, but not enough to avoid dealing with him in the first place. The state lacks imagination, and isn’t likely to improve in the next several years.
My guess is that the property continues to decay. The only question is whether it, or the hole in downtown Mystic, will be developed first.
Parenthetically, I’d love to be allowed to wander around with my camera on the grounds over there. The area has become ghoulishly picturesque.
Last year I wrote a post about credit default swaps. A few days later I was on a cable access television show and I was asked to explain them. I wonder if what I said made sense. From what I read then, it seemed clear that these instruments were a potential economic land mine:
… There are outstanding policies on debt that far exceeds the actual amount of the debt. So in fact, this is not insurance, it’s actually a sophisticated form of gambling in which, of course, you and I will be the biggest losers. There are $45 trillion, that’s right trillion dollars, or credit default swaps out there. That exceeds the value of all the stock in the stock market.
For reasons explained in the linked article, which I fear I can not accurately summarize, this is a potentially big problem. If the losses could be restricted to the schemers that dealt in these instruments it would be a good thing actually, but of course, it never works out that way.
If nothing else, the prediction at the end of that quote is coming true. Over at Firedoglake, we learn that we are possibly at the beginning of a massive bailout of these gamblers:
The last round of financing to Bank of America, that last $100bn, was in large part due to problems with Merrill Lynch CDSs, according to Gretchen Morgenson in the NYT. If this is like what happened to AIG, Merrill Lynch had to post collateral for a huge amount of CDSs, and wasn’t able to without taxpayer assistance. So, for the second time we have been forced to save this worthless excuse for a market. There is no reason to believe it won’t get worse, and that Citi and BoA will have to put up more collateral, and we have no idea whether they can post it.
By the way, to put that 100 billion in perspective, I learned today that the $15 billion Wall Street gave, by way of recent bonuses, to the folks who brought us credit defaults swaps, is more than the stimulus package has set aside for mass transit. On the other hand, the 100 billion we gave to Merrill Lynch is, if my math is right, less than .1% of the credit default swaps out there. Now, some of them may not go belly up, but a substantial amount will do so. They were never grounded in reality in the first place, but now that they’ve gone south, we may need to come up with real money to bail out this “industry”.
I cruised around and found this still mind-numbing explication of these instruments. The Eisman mentioned in the quote is Steve Eisman, a fellow who recognized that the subprime market was a fraud, and who apparently loaded up on credit default swaps so he could cash in when the market collapsed.
More interesting is Eisman’s realization that he was actually providing the liquidity necessary to keep the market going. But I’ll let Lewis describe it:
…Here he’d been making these side bets [buying Credit Default Swaps to short mortgage backed securities and CDOs] with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank…without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for [high yield fixed income product]. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans.
The question is: why do these gamblers deserve to collect their “winnings”. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, why should we pay them? They are and were merely speculators. Whether we nationalize or bail these banks out, is there a reason why we can’t do it without paying these speculators. The subprime mortgage scam at least had the limited up-side of putting people in homes, and those homes, whatever their present value, have a real existence. I’d like to see a lucid explanation from someone with expertise spelling out precisely why we should not just cut these people loose and let them take their lumps. Maybe there’s a reason, but it escapes me. How are they any different than folks who lose their shirt at the casino? And, by the way, how is this whole house of cards any different, functionally, from a Ponzi scheme. Didn’t the whole thing, ultimately require a constant in-flow of new money, whether real or fantasy?
A little exercise in alternative history.
What if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, and that presidential crook had done some hard time? What lessons did Ford’s deputies, Cheney and Rumsfeld, learn from that little episode and what would they have learned, instead, had Nixon gone to jail. And, oddly enough, given the widespread notion now that presidential wrongdoing should be considered a mere peccadillo, it is more likely than not that without that pardon Nixon would have gone on trial and would have been convicted. Moreover, it is more likely than not that Judge Sirica would have sent him to jail. Sure, most of Nixon’s co-conspirators went to jail, but Nixon didn’t.
Would Nixon’s alternative fate have given Ronald Reagan and his henchmen pause before they embarked on the arms sales to Iran?
What if the perpetrators of that criminal enterprise had done hard time, including, but not limited to, the then vice-president, who was able to cover up his own involvement by, among other things, pardoning the guy who had the goods on him? Sure, some of the folks involved were inconvenienced by having to go to trial, but none went to prison. Those that were not freed by virtue of strained legal arguments adopted by conservative judges were pardoned.
Would their alternative fate have caused Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Mukasey, Addington, and their co-conspirators to think twice (or even once?) before committing their war crimes?
It is troubling to hear Obama tell us that no one is above the law while, apparently, being prepared to demonstrate that in fact some people are above the law. Will Obama complete the slide into total non-accountability. Will these criminals, who committed far more heinous crimes than their predecessors, not even be inconvenienced by having to go on trial. Will their deeds never even by fully exposed?
It does seem clear that each time one of these events take place the perpetrators go free and their successors take away the lesson that there are no consequences for those who commit high level crimes. Each episode begets ever worse crimes. As bad as he was, it is hard to believe that Nixon would have openly adopted a torture regimen as official government policy.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that Ford’s pardon of Nixon led to the torture at Abu Ghraib. If Obama lets this opportunity to re-establish the rule of law pass, he will have green lighted the next, inevitable right wing administration to commit even worse crimes. Yes, I know it’s hard to imagine even worse crimes, but I remember that, in my innocence, I really believed we could never do worse than Nixon.
The stimulus plan got exactly zero Republican votes in the House. In order to get those votes, Obama and the Democrats added useless tax cuts, and subtracted family planning funding, etc.
Now, if Obama expected this, and has some long term strategy to capitalize on it, fine. But if he really thought he could get these people to act responsibly, then we are in serious trouble.
Meantime, Ms. Pelosi should take immediate steps to make sure that the 11 Democrats who voted “No” are given to understand that their votes are no longer needed for the Democrats to keep majority status, and that there will be consequences to them if they fail to toe the line.
You may recall that much of Sarah Palin’s foreign policy experience, other than the Russian flyovers, consisted of a stopover at an Irish airport. Turns out that Barack Obama has a bigger claim on the Emerald Isle. I’m beginning to feel cheated. Doesn’t he have any Polish or Italian blood in there?
This is a story about what happens when one branch of our government relinquishes its proper role in the name of national security.
In 1948 an Air Force plane crashed. A number of people were killed, including some civilian employees of RCA. Their family members sued the Air Force for negligence, and asked for a copy of the Air Force’s investigation into the incident. The Air Force didn’t want to provide it. The trial judge ordered the Air Force to provide the report for in camera inspection. (“in camera” means that the judge reviews the document and decides whether it should be released.) The Air Force refused, and the trial judge entered a default against it. The Circuit Court upheld the trial judge. The Supreme Court, however, reversed, crafting a “state secrets” privilege out of thin air. Essentially, the court ruled that the government could declare something a “state secret” and that put an end to the matter. No review, ever, of any claim that a piece of evidence is a “state secret”, or, for that matter, of a government claim that a whole lawsuit must be dismissed because the government merely claims that its further prosecution would compromise state secrets.
I remember reading the case when I was in law school. It seemed patently obvious that the whole thing was a lie, and that the government was just engaged in a coverup. Turns out that was true. In the latest New York Review of Books, Garry Wills reviews two books about the incident. (Unfortunately, the NYRB does not post the full text of all of its articles, even the week of publication. This is among those you cannot read in full) It turns out that the report was declassified during the Clinton Administration, and much to nobody’s surprise, there wasn’t anything in it that constituted any kind of secret, unless massive incompetence on the part of the Air Force can be considered the sort of secret that needs protecting. I daresay that a review of the other cases in which it has been used would lead the impartial observer to conclude that real state secrets were threatened in very few.
It’s pretty obvious that if one litigant gets to withhold evidence, that litigant will have an incentive to do so, particularly when it wants to avoid embarrassment. If that litigant is, for all practical purposes, the judge of its own cause, it is likely to rule for itself. And if that litigant is running a criminal enterprise, like, say, the Bush Administration, then it will avail itself of its get out of lawsuit free card at every opportunity.
Separation of powers is at the very core of our system. The founders realized that unchecked power was absolute power, and as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so it has been with the states secret privilege. Wills sums it up nicely in the title of his review: Why the Government Can Legally Lie.
Perhaps we owe Bush and his cronies a debt of thanks. Other Administrations have used this device to cover up their crimes or peccadillos, but Bush outdid them all, and now at least one judge has pushed back. Whether the higher courts will back him up is an open question and Obama has sent mixed signals at best on issues like this. But the history of this court created grant of absolute power to the executive has been a dismal one, demonstrating in spades that the Founders were right about unchecked power.
This is far worse than buying a jet:
Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
I just finished watching Keith Olbermann and the beginning of Rachel Maddow’s show. Both of them bemoaned Obama’s push for “bi-partisanship” on the stimulus package, and both they and their guests feel the Democrats are being played by the Republicans. That may all turn out to be true, but let me propose an alternative theory.
First, let’s start out with some basic propositions.
If one accepts those two propositions, it follows that Obama is looking two or three moves ahead in all of this. Or, to employ another metaphor, he is giving the Republicans plenty of rope, and they may be proceeding to hang themselves. Recall how Clinton made the Republicans look when they shut down the government back in 1994. I have a tough time believing that Obama ever expected substantial Republican support, but I do believe he may be in a position to pick off the few remaining non-Southerners, and he is in a great position to make the rest of them look like the obstructionists that they are. When he springs the trap, they will find themselves even more isolated and even more marginalized than they are right now, and he can say that he made every effort to bring them in to the process.
Of course, I could be wrong about all this. We’ll see.
UPDATE: This may be the canary in the coal mine. If Obama caves on the family planning provision, then it’s almost a sure thing that he’s bought into a hopeless quest for bi-partisanship. It is precisely on those portions of the plan that have been most distorted by the Republicans that he should stand firm.