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Speculative history

Thursday, January 29, 2009

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.


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Well that was a surprise

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

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.


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Barack O’bama

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

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?


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From little rotten acorns, rotten oaks are grown

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

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.


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Your bailout money at work

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

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.


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Bipartisanship

Monday, January 26, 2009

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.

  • Obama is a brilliant man, who ran a brilliant political campaign. He is as politically astute as they come.
  • It is extremely unlikely that Obama expected anything but the reaction he has gotten from the Republicans.

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.


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The next act

Monday, January 26, 2009

Here we go again. Pro Publica reports that the next financial meltdown is coming to a community bank near you, particularly if you live in an area that has seen a lot of development in the past few years.

…small banks are suffering from a wave of defaults on construction and development loans that could cause dozens more to succumb in the year ahead.

As with the subprime meltdown, Sun Belt states are likely to be the hardest hit: Georgia, Florida, the southwest and California. In a worst-case scenario, the FDIC insurance fund, which stood at $34.6 billion in the third quarter of 2008, could run out and require a taxpayer bailout. The government’s bailout program has so far invested about $230 billion in 290 banks — the lion’s share of it to large banks — and there’s talk of another round.

“A significant portion of the U.S. banking system is overexposed to commercial real estate,” says bank analyst Gerard Cassidy of RBC Capital Markets. Federal Reserve data show commercial real estate loan delinquencies growing nearly fourfold between the first quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2008. Smaller banks, like Silver State, are at particular risk. Analysts Oppenheimer and Co. issued a report in November concluding that banks with total assets below $1 billion have, on average, 26 percent of their loans related to commercial real estate. For banks with assets above $1 billion that figure is only 11 percent.

Cassidy has estimated that 200 to 300 more banks are in danger of being closed. If so, it would be the biggest spate of financial institution failures since the savings and loan crisis, when more than 1,000 banks and S&Ls shuttered in 1988 and 1989. Just as today, the inability of developers to repay their commercial development loans played a major role.

The usual suspects are once again involved. Greedy bankers, and of course, Bush non-regulators:

Three years ago, federal regulators recognized that banks were amassing big concentrations of commercial development loans and lowering lending standards at the same time. Their response was to issue a mild warning: Take steps to reduce the risk from such loans, or face increased supervision and requirements to raise capital that could serve as a bulwark against potential losses.

Though far from a crackdown, even that mild guidance was too much for banks. Thousands of industry comments poured in objecting to the regulators’ intrusion, and the FDIC and other agencies backed off, clarifying that they didn’t intend to impose limits.

Donald Isken, a Delaware attorney who specializes in commercial real estate law, said today’s rise in defaults on commercial development loans speaks for itself. “Obviously, (the rules) were not strict enough,” he said. “It’s just a fact.”


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Pope Benedict embraces a holocaust denier

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Having long since joined the ranks of the non-believers, I have no personal stake in any particular religious faith, but I must confess that, having had Catholicism pounded in to me at an early age, I still feel a bit of a preference for the old faith. Perhaps the way I feel is a bit like many ex-Republicans feel about the party that has forced their departure.

For it appears that the Catholic Church, like the Republicans,has decided that it’s future is in its base, and only in its base. The Church that requires each of its adherents to agree on the unknowable: the moment of the beginning of life, is not so exacting when it comes to unquestioned historical fact:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has increasingly moved in line with traditionalists who are hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

A theologian who has grappled with the church’s diminished status in a secular world, Benedict has sought to foster a more ardent, if smaller, church over one with looser faith.

…

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of St. Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, also called Vatican II. Archbishop Lefebvre made the men bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.

Another “bishop” that the Pope has re-admitted to the faith believes that the event of 9/11 were masterminded by the federal government. It should be noted, too, that the Pope apparently reached out to these people; they did not come crawling back.

There is, I think, a parallel here with the Republican party. For years it catered to an ever shrinking base. Its successes masked the underlying dynamic of its shrinking appeal beyond the base. It took a while for the reality of the modern Republican party to shrink in for its old adherents, but when it did, they melted away, leaving it exposed as a regional party of dead enders. It will come back, but only when it finds a way to appeal beyond the crazy people to whom it has hitched its wagon.

The Catholic Church has been around a lot longer than the Republican party, but nothing lasts forever. After all, the religion of Zeus and Jove existed at least as long. It has nearly died in Europe, and it hangs on in America much like the Republican party hung on here in the Northeast for a while-by the willingness of its hereditary adherents to overlook its faults and excesses. But, as with the Republicans, the Church’s insistence on intolerance and rigidity in an increasingly tolerant America will eventually lead to its collapse. The Catholic Church is, in some ways, more vulnerable than the Republicans. Republicans can count on a financial base of support from their religious nuts and their corporate sponsors. The Church, having lost all secular power, and any influence in Europe, relies on American Catholics for its financial lifeline. Long before they formally leave the Church, they will start withdrawing financial support. A future Pope will have to decide whether dogma or money is more important. My own experience leads me predict that the financial issues will prevail. If not, then there will come a time, at least in this country, when American Catholics will decide that they have had enough, and Benedict, or his successor, will surely get the smaller, if more ardent, Church he is seeking.


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Obama’s First Address to the Nation

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Obama has updated the weekly radio address. It’s on youtube now.

Sounds like he’s listened to Al Gore on the power grid issue. Isn’t it great to have a president who knows what he’s talking about, and makes sense to boot?


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Friday Night Music-Don McLean

Friday, January 23, 2009

One of the weirder moments in the Inaugural concert was Garth Brooks singing “American Pie”. He chose to stick to the chorus and didn’t sing the verses. It’s an odd song, to say the least, to sing at a concert that is delivering a message of hope and optimism. The song does neither. It reminds me of Republicans using Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a patriotic anthem. Doesn’t anyone listen to lyrics? Anyway, Brooks’ performance at least gave me an idea for a Friday Night song. I suppose this song has become a bit of a cliche, but I like it.

http://www.youtube.com/v/iMlzfpwJZuc&hl=en&fs=1“>


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