None of us want another terrorist attack in the United States. Equally,
most of us have nothing to hide from the federal government, which
already has so many ways of knowing about us. And we know that the
just-revealed National Security Agency program does not actually listen
to our calls; it uses the phone numbers, frequency, length and times of
the calls for data-mining.
So, why is it that many Americans, including me, are so upset with the Obama administration gathering up telephone records?
My concerns are twofold. First, the law under which President George W.
Bush and now President Obama have acted was not intended to give the
government records of all telephone calls. If that had been the intent,
the law would have said that. It didn’t. Rather, the law envisioned the
administration coming to a special court on a case-by-case basis to
explain why it needed to have specific records.
I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic
surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to
our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly
secretive.
The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the
terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is
being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant
of what their government was doing.
Secondly, we should worry about this program because government
agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have a
well-established track record of overreaching, exceeding their authority
and abusing the law. The FBI has used provisions of the Patriot Act,
intended to combat terrorism, for purposes that greatly exceed
congressional intent.
Even if you trust Obama, should we have programs and interpretations of
law that others could abuse now without his knowing it or later in
another administration? Obama thought we needed to set up rules about
drones because of what the next President might do. Why does he not see
the threat from this telephone program?
The answer is that he inherited this vacuum cleaner approach to
telephone records from Bush. When Obama was briefed on it, there was no
forceful and persuasive advocate for changing it. His chief adviser on
these things at the time was John Brennan, a life-long CIA officer.
Obama must have been told that the government needed everyone’s phone
logs in the NSA’s computers for several reasons.
The bureaucrats surely argued that it was easier to run the big data
search and correlation program on one database. They said there was no
law that could compel the telephone companies to store the records on
their own servers.
If the telephone companies did so, government and company lawyers then
certainly said, they would become legally “an agent” of the government
and could be sued by customers for violating the terms of their service
agreements.
Finally, Obama was certainly told, if the NSA and the FBI had to query
telephone company servers, then the phone companies would know whom the
government was watching, a violation of need-to-know secrecy traditions.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
This Will Not End Well
By Eugene Robinson
A general view of damaged shops in Qusair, Syria.
AP/SANA
WASHINGTON—In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible “moderates” whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.
This will not end well.
It is tragic that more than 90,000 people have been killed in the bloody Syrian conflict, with more than a million displaced. But I have heard no claim that President Obama’s decision to arm the rebels will halt or even slow the carnage. To the contrary, sending more weapons into the fray will likely result in greater death and destruction, at least in the short term.
So this is not promising as a humanitarian intervention. And if the aim is to punish dictator Bashar al-Assad for his apparent use of chemical weapons, surely there are measures—a missile strike on the regime’s military airfields, for example—that would make the point without also making an open-ended commitment.
Why decide now to announce stepped-up direct support for Gen. Salim Idriss and his rebel forces? It is surely not a coincidence that the Syrian military—with the help of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia backed by Iran—has been pulverizing the rebels in recent weeks and now threatens to recapture Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub.
Hence, a complicated proxy war: The United States supports Idriss. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are U.S. allies, send money and arms to competing rebel factions that dream of turning Syria into an Islamic republic. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are supporting Assad with weapons, money and—in the case of Hezbollah—well-trained troops. The rebel side is mostly Sunni; the government side largely Shiite.
As I said, this will not end well.
President Obama’s reluctance to get dragged into this morass has been commendable, but now his ambivalence and caution become liabilities. Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world is Syria. Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union is in Syria. Does Obama care as much as those nations’ leaders do about who wins the war? If not, what’s the point?
It could be argued that providing Idriss with light arms and ammunition is a way to equip moderate, secular forces for their inevitable fight against Islamists in a fractured post-Assad Syria. But this is moot if Assad crushes the rebellion and holds on. Accordingly, U.S. aid reportedly may include some heavier weapons for use against tanks and aircraft. The CIA will take the lead in transferring the arms and training the rebels to use them, according to The Washington Post.
Perhaps bolstering Idriss can at least buy time for negotiations to produce a political settlement, which is what Obama has said he prefers. For a long time, Russia balked at joining the call for an international peace conference. Now that momentum on the battlefield has shifted and the Assad regime is in a stronger position, Russia is more willing to summon everyone to the table—but the Obama administration is no longer in such a big hurry.
Not every slope is slippery, but this one looks like a bobsled run. It was August 2011 when Obama issued a statement declaring that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Now that the president has put muscle behind those words, it will be difficult for the United States to accept any other outcome.
There will be pressure to impose a no-fly zone to neutralize Assad’s devastating air power. There will be pressure to contain the war so it does not spill beyond Syria’s borders and destabilize our allies in Turkey and Jordan, or our sort-of, kind-of allies in Iraq. There will be pressure to alleviate the immense suffering of the Syrian people. Perhaps all of this can be accomplished without putting American lives at risk. I doubt it.
Above all, there will be pressure to win a proxy war that Obama never wanted to fight. This is how quagmires begin, with one reluctant step after another toward the yawning abyss. (See: Vietnam.)
We do sometimes win proxy wars—in Afghanistan, for example, where the CIA helped the warlords defeat the mighty Soviet army. In the process, however, we created the chaotic power vacuum that allowed al-Qaeda to set up shop—and ultimately launch the 9/11 attacks.
I hope I’m wrong, but fear I’m right: This will not end well.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com
WASHINGTON—In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible “moderates” whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.
This will not end well.
It is tragic that more than 90,000 people have been killed in the bloody Syrian conflict, with more than a million displaced. But I have heard no claim that President Obama’s decision to arm the rebels will halt or even slow the carnage. To the contrary, sending more weapons into the fray will likely result in greater death and destruction, at least in the short term.
So this is not promising as a humanitarian intervention. And if the aim is to punish dictator Bashar al-Assad for his apparent use of chemical weapons, surely there are measures—a missile strike on the regime’s military airfields, for example—that would make the point without also making an open-ended commitment.
Why decide now to announce stepped-up direct support for Gen. Salim Idriss and his rebel forces? It is surely not a coincidence that the Syrian military—with the help of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia backed by Iran—has been pulverizing the rebels in recent weeks and now threatens to recapture Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub.
Hence, a complicated proxy war: The United States supports Idriss. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are U.S. allies, send money and arms to competing rebel factions that dream of turning Syria into an Islamic republic. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are supporting Assad with weapons, money and—in the case of Hezbollah—well-trained troops. The rebel side is mostly Sunni; the government side largely Shiite.
As I said, this will not end well.
President Obama’s reluctance to get dragged into this morass has been commendable, but now his ambivalence and caution become liabilities. Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world is Syria. Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union is in Syria. Does Obama care as much as those nations’ leaders do about who wins the war? If not, what’s the point?
It could be argued that providing Idriss with light arms and ammunition is a way to equip moderate, secular forces for their inevitable fight against Islamists in a fractured post-Assad Syria. But this is moot if Assad crushes the rebellion and holds on. Accordingly, U.S. aid reportedly may include some heavier weapons for use against tanks and aircraft. The CIA will take the lead in transferring the arms and training the rebels to use them, according to The Washington Post.
Perhaps bolstering Idriss can at least buy time for negotiations to produce a political settlement, which is what Obama has said he prefers. For a long time, Russia balked at joining the call for an international peace conference. Now that momentum on the battlefield has shifted and the Assad regime is in a stronger position, Russia is more willing to summon everyone to the table—but the Obama administration is no longer in such a big hurry.
Not every slope is slippery, but this one looks like a bobsled run. It was August 2011 when Obama issued a statement declaring that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Now that the president has put muscle behind those words, it will be difficult for the United States to accept any other outcome.
There will be pressure to impose a no-fly zone to neutralize Assad’s devastating air power. There will be pressure to contain the war so it does not spill beyond Syria’s borders and destabilize our allies in Turkey and Jordan, or our sort-of, kind-of allies in Iraq. There will be pressure to alleviate the immense suffering of the Syrian people. Perhaps all of this can be accomplished without putting American lives at risk. I doubt it.
Above all, there will be pressure to win a proxy war that Obama never wanted to fight. This is how quagmires begin, with one reluctant step after another toward the yawning abyss. (See: Vietnam.)
We do sometimes win proxy wars—in Afghanistan, for example, where the CIA helped the warlords defeat the mighty Soviet army. In the process, however, we created the chaotic power vacuum that allowed al-Qaeda to set up shop—and ultimately launch the 9/11 attacks.
I hope I’m wrong, but fear I’m right: This will not end well.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is dark and full of terrors
The world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is dark and full of terrors (preview)
June 17, 2013 8:30 AM
There’s
about 80 different monsters in The Witcher 3, the developer says, and
each has its own habitat, strengths, and weaknesses. During the demo,
the developer showed a side quest involving a formerly peaceful woodland
spirit that is now terrorizing the village that used to worship it.
Geralt agrees to slay the beast (for a price), but first he has to find
it. A simple press of a button activates Geralt’s new Witcher Sense
(think Detective Vision in Batman: Arkham Asylum), and it’s not long
before he spots the creature’s trail. He discovers that it’s a Leshen — a
tall, antlered being that can control the forest and disappear in a
cloud of ravens.
You know, when you think about it, The Witcher video game series shares some similarities with the hit HBO TV show Game of Thrones.
Both are based on works by popular fantasy authors. Both tell tales of
characters that are neither completely good nor completely evil. Both
are set in harsh fictional medieval worlds populated with mythical
creatures, scheming nobles, and the occasional brother-sister incest.
And they both look damn good.
Due for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in
2014, The Witcher 3 is the final entry in CD Projekt RED’s critically
acclaimed action-role-playing game franchise. It’s also the first title
in the series to feature a truly open game world and free-roaming
exploration, and it’s gorgeously detailed.
CD Projekt claims it’s 35
times bigger than The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (a large game in
itself) and takes 40 minutes to travel on horseback end to end.
“Basically, the new philosophy of exploring the world in
The Witcher 3 is that you can get to every place you see on the screen,”
the developer told the media during a live gameplay demo at this week’s
Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. “This is a massive
improvement in comparison to Witcher 2, which had some artificial
barriers.”
Of course, a world that big and beautiful is pointless
unless it’s filled with interesting things to do.
The Witcher 3′s
standalone, nonlinear story once again focuses on mutant monster hunter
Geralt of Rivia. CD Projekt promises a more personal story for Geralt
this time around. Now freed from the political machinations of kings and
elves, he’s able to search for his loved ones and pursue the Wild Hunt,
a spectral force straight out of folklore that brings death and terror
to all it passes. The beginning of the demo shows these skeletal riders
attacking a village, and Geralt seeks the lone survivor of the massacre
to get some answers.
The ability to track down and slay epic beasts is nothing new — Capcom built an entire franchise
around it. But it’s an important part of The Witcher lore, and CD
Projekt is putting greater emphasis on it this time around. “We decided
we would no longer have this world of enemies who are very weak and who
you’re just slashing them and killing them,” said The Witcher 3 game
director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “We decided to create this Monster
Hunting system and the Witcher Sense system and create monsters in a way
that would be unique. They got their own special abilities, and the
hunt for every one of these monsters will be different. You will feel
that you’re a monster hunter actually in the game.”
There’s
about 80 different monsters in The Witcher 3, the developer says, and
each has its own habitat, strengths, and weaknesses. During the demo,
the developer showed a side quest involving a formerly peaceful woodland
spirit that is now terrorizing the village that used to worship it.
Geralt agrees to slay the beast (for a price), but first he has to find
it. A simple press of a button activates Geralt’s new Witcher Sense
(think Detective Vision in Batman: Arkham Asylum), and it’s not long
before he spots the creature’s trail. He discovers that it’s a Leshen — a
tall, antlered being that can control the forest and disappear in a
cloud of ravens.
Geralt has deep knowledge of his world’s more deadlier
creatures, and all of that information is in the game’s Monster Journal.
This Wikipedia-like bestiary is incredibly detailed; by reading it, the
player learns that the Leshen is very territorial and uses totems to
steal power from the forest. It also likes to bind itself to a nearby
human and use that person’s vital energy to resurrect itself if it’s
slain. Once again, Geralt’s heightened senses allow him to find the
marked person, an innocent woman named Hilde. Once she’s dealt with
(presumably killed), Geralt is free to hunt down and destroy the totems
and finally the spirit itself.
The battle with the Leshen is a spooky, tense affair.
Wolves spring out of the shadows at Geralt, and massive tree roots rise
up to strike and hinder him. The Leshen itself is a cagey opponent that
randomly teleports about the forest, but eventually Geralt is successful
and returns to the village to collect his reward.
There he learns that not all of the world’s monsters have
antlers or walk on four legs. While he was off dealing with the Leshen,
the man who hired him decided to stage a coup, slaying the village
elders in cold blood. Geralt calls the man a murderer but ultimately
collects his fee and moves on. What else can he do? The world of The
Witcher is dark and morally ambiguous, and sometimes picking the lesser
of two evils is the best choice available.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Martin Bashir to Michael Steele: 'What Does the GOP Hope to Accomplish?'
By scarce
After playing a series of embarassing clips from Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, Allen West, Sarah Palin, John Ratzenberger and others, the same bunch of assorted lunatics who show up at all these conservative conferences over and over again, this time at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference now on in DC, Martin Bashir asked former RNC Chairman Michael Steele this rather pointed question...
After playing a series of embarassing clips from Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, Allen West, Sarah Palin, John Ratzenberger and others, the same bunch of assorted lunatics who show up at all these conservative conferences over and over again, this time at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference now on in DC, Martin Bashir asked former RNC Chairman Michael Steele this rather pointed question...
MARTIN BASHIR: What does the GOP hope to accomplish by repeatedly appealing to the far right of the party while at the same time possibly alienating more mainstream republicans?
MICHAEL STEELE: [Deep breath and a sigh] Well, I think they need to.......and Steele's voice trailed off as MSNBC's Karen Finney and Touré burst into howls of laughter.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Surveillance State Hypocrisy Champion Sean Hannity
By Brad Friedman on 6/12/2013, 8:22pm PT
Several days ago, I posted a video showing the stark differences between the positions on massive surveillance programs by candidate Barack Obama in 2007 and President Barack Obama in 2013.
And now, since we're nothing if not "fair and balanced", here is a short video of Sean Hannity of Fox "News" repeatedly lauding massive NSA surveillance programs during the George W. Bush Administration...and then decrying the very same programs as "tyranny" and a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution now that Obama is doing it.
With all due respect to Hannity - and I have none - his over the top hypocrisy then versus now trumps even Obama's, hands down. Not to mention the small detail that the programs, as carried out under Bush were, at the time, illegal, while under Obama they have been made "legal". (Or so we are told. There is so much secrecy around them, of course, it is virtually impossible for the public to know either way.) Enjoy!...
Several days ago, I posted a video showing the stark differences between the positions on massive surveillance programs by candidate Barack Obama in 2007 and President Barack Obama in 2013.
And now, since we're nothing if not "fair and balanced", here is a short video of Sean Hannity of Fox "News" repeatedly lauding massive NSA surveillance programs during the George W. Bush Administration...and then decrying the very same programs as "tyranny" and a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution now that Obama is doing it.
With all due respect to Hannity - and I have none - his over the top hypocrisy then versus now trumps even Obama's, hands down. Not to mention the small detail that the programs, as carried out under Bush were, at the time, illegal, while under Obama they have been made "legal". (Or so we are told. There is so much secrecy around them, of course, it is virtually impossible for the public to know either way.) Enjoy!...
Big Banks Caught Rigging Currency Markets Again: Please, Can We Regulate Them Now?
By Elisabeth Parker
What do you do when you have more money than God? Cheat so you can make even more money! Bloomberg reports that foreign exchange traders at “some of the world’s biggest banks” got caught rigging currency markets to generate higher profits. Even more disturbing, it turns out they’ve been doing it for an entire decade. Basically, WM/Reuters sets foreign exchange rates and currency values each morning based on trades and quotes from the previous day. But traders can — and apparently often do — place massive buy and sell orders late in the day to weight values in their favor. This practice — the global financier’s version of the proverbial butcher surreptitiously placing a thumb on the scale — is controversial, but not explicitly illegal:
Despite the fact that the too-big-to-fail whales
big banks have repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted, the GOP STILL
doesn’t want us to regulate them. They have repeatedly tried to sabotage the Dodd-Frank act,
so bankers and traders can lie, cheat, and rob people blind with
impunity while destroying our economy, America’s middle class, and our
faith in our financial system.
AI’s Justin Rosario reported earlier this week that Representative Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) vociferously objected when the Financial Stability Oversight Council identified “at least three” financial institutions as too-big-to-fail, and requiring higher levels of oversight and regulation to “keep them from dragging the entire financial sector under in a replay of the 2007-2008 collapse.” Apparently, Hensarling protested that taxpayers would be placed “greater risk of being forced to fund yet another Wall Street bailout,” and added, “Designating any company as ‘too big to fail’ is bad policy and even worse economics.”
For today’s Republicans, apparently, free markets are not supposed to be transparent, and companies should not be held accountable for their actions and lack of ethical behavior. Go figure.
If you’re curious about how the currency markets and foreign exchanges work, and have a half hour to kill, watch the British Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary, “Billion Dollar Day.” The 1986 film follows three traders in New York, London, and Hong Kong, as they wheel and deal and exchange over a billion dollars in various currencies over the course of 24 hours. These days, an average of $4.7 trillion is traded each day on the foreign exchanges. Here’s the video:
If you’re short on time, here’s the short version — an ancient, humorous commercial from a leading foreign exchange broker, Forex. Just substitute the Euro for the Great Britain Pound (GBP) and the Chinese Yuan for the Japanese Yen. Here’s the video:
Today’s
Republicans seem to think rigging currency markets and robbing
customers and tax payers blind is a perfectly acceptable way for banks
to operate. Image from www.bellybillboard.com.
What do you do when you have more money than God? Cheat so you can make even more money! Bloomberg reports that foreign exchange traders at “some of the world’s biggest banks” got caught rigging currency markets to generate higher profits. Even more disturbing, it turns out they’ve been doing it for an entire decade. Basically, WM/Reuters sets foreign exchange rates and currency values each morning based on trades and quotes from the previous day. But traders can — and apparently often do — place massive buy and sell orders late in the day to weight values in their favor. This practice — the global financier’s version of the proverbial butcher surreptitiously placing a thumb on the scale — is controversial, but not explicitly illegal:
Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said the current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial. Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years. [...]Furthermore, the foreign exchange market is considered to be “like the Wild West” even by the low standards of these anti-regulation, libertarian finance industry types:
Meanwhile, Peter Schroeder from The Hill reports that Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) issued a statement demanding that the Treasury Department revisit its recent decision to exempt foreign exchange from the stronger regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act:The $4.7 trillion-a-day currency market, the biggest in the financial system, is one of the least regulated. The inherent conflict banks face between executing client orders and profiting from their own trades is exacerbated because most currency trading takes place away from exchanges.
“The Treasury Department should reconsider its ill-advised exemption of foreign exchange derivatives from the full protections of the Dodd-Frank Act. Our financial regulators should protect American businesses and families from price rigging abuses by fully regulating these derivatives trades and by finalizing the long overdue Merkley-Levin provisions on proprietary trading and conflicts of interest.”Considering how recently Barclays and other international banks got in hot water for fixing the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), you’d think folks in Washington would listen to the senator from Michigan. But … oh wait, I forgot … The House is run by a bunch of crazy Republicans who think unscrupulous traders from big banks should be able to do whatever the heck they want.
Despite the fact that the
AI’s Justin Rosario reported earlier this week that Representative Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) vociferously objected when the Financial Stability Oversight Council identified “at least three” financial institutions as too-big-to-fail, and requiring higher levels of oversight and regulation to “keep them from dragging the entire financial sector under in a replay of the 2007-2008 collapse.” Apparently, Hensarling protested that taxpayers would be placed “greater risk of being forced to fund yet another Wall Street bailout,” and added, “Designating any company as ‘too big to fail’ is bad policy and even worse economics.”
For today’s Republicans, apparently, free markets are not supposed to be transparent, and companies should not be held accountable for their actions and lack of ethical behavior. Go figure.
If you’re curious about how the currency markets and foreign exchanges work, and have a half hour to kill, watch the British Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary, “Billion Dollar Day.” The 1986 film follows three traders in New York, London, and Hong Kong, as they wheel and deal and exchange over a billion dollars in various currencies over the course of 24 hours. These days, an average of $4.7 trillion is traded each day on the foreign exchanges. Here’s the video:
If you’re short on time, here’s the short version — an ancient, humorous commercial from a leading foreign exchange broker, Forex. Just substitute the Euro for the Great Britain Pound (GBP) and the Chinese Yuan for the Japanese Yen. Here’s the video:
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Why you should worry about the NSA
The just-revealed surveillance stretches the law to its breaking point and opens the door to future potential abuses
Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 4:15 AM
How troubled should Americans be by the NSA’s spying?
All Those People Who Were Supposed to Get Insurance Probably Won't
One year later, the Supreme Court's health care decision on Medicaid
expansion looks more like a Pyrrhic victory for the President.
By
When the Supreme Court decided the big health-care case last June, its ruling was seen as a huge win for President Obama. His administration had fended off a challenge that would have dismantled the entire reform effort; it lost on only a small issue to which few people had paid much heed. But a year later, it's increasingly clear that the minor loss is punching a major hole in the law's primary ambition - expanding health insurance coverage to most of the 49 million Americans who lack it.
Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance for the poor and disabled, was a cornerstone of the law's strategy. An expansion of the program that would open eligibility to every American earning an income near or below the poverty line was designed to enroll some 17 million people - about half of the law's coverage gains. But the Court ruled that Washington couldn't force the states to expand their programs, and politicians in most states, disdainful of Medicaid's rules and opposed to all things "Obamacare," have simply said no.
That means some 25 states, and some 7 million people, will lose out on access to coverage, leaving low-income residents with no opportunity to obtain affordable insurance in the new regime. "It's bad," says Caroline Pearson of the consultancy Avalere Health. As recently as February, she had predicted as few as five state holdouts by year's end; her current forecast is much more pessimistic.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is putting on a brave face. "Given the climate around this law, given the number of states that were actually in litigation, and the election, the number of Republican governors who stepped up and said, 'We really want to do this,' I find to be very encouraging," she tells National Journal. Nevertheless, it's a long way from the administration's original plan.
Twenty-six states brought the case asserting their right not to expand Medicaid. Although they won that right, administration officials, health industry leaders, and journalists concluded after the Supreme Court decision that they'd eventually go along. The feds promise to pay 100 percent of expansion costs for three years, and then an amount that would never go below 90 percent; this was seen as too good a deal to turn down. Governors had grandstanded against the 2009 economic-stimulus money too, but nearly all had signed on. What state leader would want to turn down a huge infusion of federal cash?
Republican governors soon began querying HHS. Would the department let them use federal funding to expand Medicaid only partway? HHS held off answering them for months, and then, after the presidential election, told them the decision was all or nothing. The administration was sending a message: The law cannot be bargained over or repealed, so the choice is in or out.
As predicted, Republican governors started flipping. First Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada endorsed a full expansion. Then came the governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan. Even Rick Scott, the Florida governor elected on an anti-Obamacare platform, said expanding Medicaid was the right thing to do. Chris Christie followed suit in New Jersey, as did others. But endorsements haven't always led to expansions. The Florida Legislature did not share the governor's conversion, and Scott quickly backed down. At press time, both Ohio and Arizona's Legislatures continue to debate expansion.
Other governors who were considered obvious gets - such as Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Tennessee's Bill Haslam - declined expansion. Some of the poorest states with the most to gain have left piles of federal cash on the table. Medicaid was such a toxic issue in Mississippi that the Legislature adjourned without even reauthorizing the state's current program. While governors know they'll be judged on the health of the state economy, many legislators care more about ideological purity, and few Republican lawmakers are interested in the political risk associated with voting for anything branded with the president's name. Brian Haille, a former health aide to Haslam, says he doesn't expect any Medicaid enthusiasm in Tennessee until after the Republican primary filing deadline next year. "You've got lawmakers who are ducking and covering and do not want to vote on anything related to Obamacare before then," he said.
There may still be some stragglers. Kentucky Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear announced in May his state would move forward (he doesn't need legislative approval). Republican Gov. Terry Branstad in Iowa, an early skeptic about Medicaid, just reached an agreement with his Legislature to expand. But to do so, he needed to rebrand the program as something else. The plan, which still needs federal approval, will move some poor residents into private insurance markets and other into a state-run program that covers different benefits and pays doctors differently from the state's existing Medicaid program. "It isn't Medicaid expansion," insists Michael Bousselot, a policy adviser to Branstad, although he notes that it will use the federal funds. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert tells NJ he won't be making a Medicaid decision until at least September.
But given the logistical and administrative hurdles associated with expansion, even if politicians change their minds and convene special legislative sessions, few additional states will be able to expand by January. That means many low-income Americans will be left uninsured next year, despite the promise of health care reform. While middle-income people will have access to subsidized private insurance, the poorest adults in those states that don't expand will get nothing. The Supreme Court dealt Obamacare a major blow after all.
By
When the Supreme Court decided the big health-care case last June, its ruling was seen as a huge win for President Obama. His administration had fended off a challenge that would have dismantled the entire reform effort; it lost on only a small issue to which few people had paid much heed. But a year later, it's increasingly clear that the minor loss is punching a major hole in the law's primary ambition - expanding health insurance coverage to most of the 49 million Americans who lack it.
Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance for the poor and disabled, was a cornerstone of the law's strategy. An expansion of the program that would open eligibility to every American earning an income near or below the poverty line was designed to enroll some 17 million people - about half of the law's coverage gains. But the Court ruled that Washington couldn't force the states to expand their programs, and politicians in most states, disdainful of Medicaid's rules and opposed to all things "Obamacare," have simply said no.
That means some 25 states, and some 7 million people, will lose out on access to coverage, leaving low-income residents with no opportunity to obtain affordable insurance in the new regime. "It's bad," says Caroline Pearson of the consultancy Avalere Health. As recently as February, she had predicted as few as five state holdouts by year's end; her current forecast is much more pessimistic.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is putting on a brave face. "Given the climate around this law, given the number of states that were actually in litigation, and the election, the number of Republican governors who stepped up and said, 'We really want to do this,' I find to be very encouraging," she tells National Journal. Nevertheless, it's a long way from the administration's original plan.
Twenty-six states brought the case asserting their right not to expand Medicaid. Although they won that right, administration officials, health industry leaders, and journalists concluded after the Supreme Court decision that they'd eventually go along. The feds promise to pay 100 percent of expansion costs for three years, and then an amount that would never go below 90 percent; this was seen as too good a deal to turn down. Governors had grandstanded against the 2009 economic-stimulus money too, but nearly all had signed on. What state leader would want to turn down a huge infusion of federal cash?
Republican governors soon began querying HHS. Would the department let them use federal funding to expand Medicaid only partway? HHS held off answering them for months, and then, after the presidential election, told them the decision was all or nothing. The administration was sending a message: The law cannot be bargained over or repealed, so the choice is in or out.
As predicted, Republican governors started flipping. First Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada endorsed a full expansion. Then came the governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan. Even Rick Scott, the Florida governor elected on an anti-Obamacare platform, said expanding Medicaid was the right thing to do. Chris Christie followed suit in New Jersey, as did others. But endorsements haven't always led to expansions. The Florida Legislature did not share the governor's conversion, and Scott quickly backed down. At press time, both Ohio and Arizona's Legislatures continue to debate expansion.
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Other governors who were considered obvious gets - such as Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Tennessee's Bill Haslam - declined expansion. Some of the poorest states with the most to gain have left piles of federal cash on the table. Medicaid was such a toxic issue in Mississippi that the Legislature adjourned without even reauthorizing the state's current program. While governors know they'll be judged on the health of the state economy, many legislators care more about ideological purity, and few Republican lawmakers are interested in the political risk associated with voting for anything branded with the president's name. Brian Haille, a former health aide to Haslam, says he doesn't expect any Medicaid enthusiasm in Tennessee until after the Republican primary filing deadline next year. "You've got lawmakers who are ducking and covering and do not want to vote on anything related to Obamacare before then," he said.
There may still be some stragglers. Kentucky Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear announced in May his state would move forward (he doesn't need legislative approval). Republican Gov. Terry Branstad in Iowa, an early skeptic about Medicaid, just reached an agreement with his Legislature to expand. But to do so, he needed to rebrand the program as something else. The plan, which still needs federal approval, will move some poor residents into private insurance markets and other into a state-run program that covers different benefits and pays doctors differently from the state's existing Medicaid program. "It isn't Medicaid expansion," insists Michael Bousselot, a policy adviser to Branstad, although he notes that it will use the federal funds. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert tells NJ he won't be making a Medicaid decision until at least September.
But given the logistical and administrative hurdles associated with expansion, even if politicians change their minds and convene special legislative sessions, few additional states will be able to expand by January. That means many low-income Americans will be left uninsured next year, despite the promise of health care reform. While middle-income people will have access to subsidized private insurance, the poorest adults in those states that don't expand will get nothing. The Supreme Court dealt Obamacare a major blow after all.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Townsend Farms Hepatitis A Outbreak Hits 87
At least 87 people in eight states are now known to have been sickened with hepatitis A in the outbreak connected to Townsend Farms frozen berries sold at Costco stores, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At least 36 people have been hospitalized. Based on known information, roughly 66 percent of cases are female, with the age of those infected ranging from 2 to 84.
Townsend Farms recalled all potentially contaminated products on June 4, including a berry mix sold at Harris Teeter stores. No illnesses have been associated with the Harris Teeter mix.
The Costco product was sold in a 3 lb. bag labeled “Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend, with UPC code 0 78414 404448.
Early tests have identified the virus as genotype 1B, a type rarely found in North America but more common in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Those investigating the outbreak say the contamination came from the mix’s pomegranate seeds, which were grown in Turkey.
Symptoms of hepatitis A infection include fatigue, aching muscles, nausea, fever and abdominal pain.
Those who ate the berries but have not experienced symptoms may be able to prevent infection by receiving a hepatitis A vaccine within two weeks. Those who have received a vaccine in the past do not need another one and should not fall ill.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Join Britain in cringing at Alex Jones
By Rob Beschizza
Alex Jones, American radio host and conspiracy theorist, was invited to the BBC's Sunday Politics. It is not to be missed.
Alex Jones, American radio host and conspiracy theorist, was invited to the BBC's Sunday Politics. It is not to be missed.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
The Next American Revolution Has Already Begun: An Interview With Gar Alperovitz
By Gar Smith, The Berkeley Daily Planet
Gar Alperovitz, currently a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been writing books about wealth, democracy and national security for 48 years. In addition to serving in several government posts (including Special Assistant in the US State Department), Alperovitz is a founding principle of The Democracy Collaborative and a boardmember at the New Economics Institute.
What Then Must We Do? (his latest book and his twelfth since 1965) is a breezy, conversational read filled with somber forecasts, hopeful alternative economic strategies and lots of surprising facts and stats (Some examples: If the nation's personal wealth were divided evenly, a family of four would receive $200,000 a year. The hourly US minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is now $2 less than it was in 1968. The US is such a large country "You can tuck Germany into Montana!")
What Then Must We Do? (the title is borrowed from Tolstoy) explores a challenging premise: "The coming painful decades may be the prehistory of the next American revolution – and an evolutionary process that transforms the American system, making it both morally meaningful and ecologically sustainable."
Daniel Ellsberg calls this book possibly "the most important movement-building book of the new century" and Juliet Schor, author of True Wealth, hails it as "the most compelling account yet of how we can move beyond the piecemeal, project–by–project transformation of our political economy to truly systemic change."
Alperovitz recently took time from his busy schedule to discuss the arguments in his new book and explore the ramifications of social and economic change in an era of pending systemic collapse.
Gar S: You point out that 400 plutocrats in the US now own more wealth than 180 million other Americans. A scale of inequality that ranks as “medieval.” Shortly before his assassination, Dr. King noted America's problems could not be solved without “undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”
Gar A: The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that's the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
You mentioned Martin Luther King, citing some of the quotes I included in the book. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and we will be doubtless be hearing a lot about that and Dr. King’s leadership on racial equality and civil rights. I worked with him on neighborhood ownership questions we were looking at in the Senate at the time; and then again, a few years later, when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was also questioning the distribution of wealth, citing the “triple evils” of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. At the end, right before he was assassinated, he even began to talk about changing the economic power structure, even occasionally, using the words “democratic socialism.” In this era of difficulty we would do well to remember Dr. King as a visionary who was beginning to step out beyond the cramped consensus to ask far deeper questions about the nature of America and the possibilities for a different future for this country. That is our challenge today.
Gar S: You argue that it was not politics but circumstance (the Great Depression, followed by WW II) that precipitated the New Deal's progressive change and the country’s post-war economic prosperity. I was surprised by your assessment that an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression is no longer likely. Could you explain?
Gar A: Despite the systemic problems a crisis collapse of the scope and scale of the Great Depression is not likely. Here are a few reasons. First, the size of ongoing government spending stabilizing the economy is much, much larger than it was at the time of the Great Depression. Government spending—the floor under the private economy, if you like—was at 11 percent in 1929, now it is roughly 30 to 35 percent of the economy (depending on the year, and whether we are in recession.) The economy may decline rapidly, but the floor is three times higher than it was during the 1930s. Second, today we have built-in economic “stabilizers”—spending that kicks in to help offset the decline when recessions begin to get underway: unemployment insurance, food stamps, and so on. Then there is the sea change in politics. The American public now holds political leaders responsible for making sure the economy works—or at least does not totally fail. There is a heavy political price for any politician who fails to deal with truly massive economic pain. Perhaps most importantly, when push comes to shove, major corporate leaders also support action to counteract truly major economic contractions. You saw it in 2008 and 2009 when business leaders demanded action—including the stimulus plan.
So massive and sustained economic collapse of the kind that opened the way for extremely unusual and far-reaching policy change in the Great Depression and New Deal era, though not impossible, is no longer likely. This is not to say great recessions, ongoing economic pain, and high unemployment may not occur for long periods of time. Indeed, that is what we face at present.
Gar S: The new word for economic performance is no longer “growth” but “stagnation.” One percent of the country controls so much wealth but—unlike the middle class and working poor—the rich don't spend a significant part of their wealth.
Gar A: This prospect of stagnation—or “punctuated stagnation,” as I write (there may be small intermittent upticks; plus oil and other commodity price explosions)—is very important to grasp. I believe (along with many observers) that we are entering an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. One problem is lack of demand in Keynesian terms, but I think it’s far deeper than that. We are returning to a pattern of stagnation that was common before the Depression collapse, on the one hand, and the extremely unusual conditions that prevailed during the postwar economic boom, on the other.
A short form of the argument would be this: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, up to World War I, there was decay, decline, and indeed major recession and almost depression. We don’t know what would have happened; World War I intervened, bailing out the economy. Same story with the Great Depression: World War II, not the New Deal, solved the economic problem in the second quarter of the century. In the third quarter of the century the post-war economic boom—brought about partly by savings built up during the war, partly by military spending in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the big military budgets of the Cold War, and partly because US competitors (Germany, Japan, and many others) had been significantly destroyed—was an extremely unusual boom moment—the greatest sustained boom in our history. But thereafter the pattern of economic difficulty resumed in the final quarter of the century. Even though military budgets are high today in absolute terms, they are comparatively small as a share of GDP. And I think nuclear weapons now preclude an industrial-scale global war like World War I or World War II. We can have small horrible wars, but they don’t function economically in the way that larger wars did previously.
Now these difficulties could be resolved if you had sufficient political power to mount a traditional Keynesian solution. But what is significant—and this is the heart of the matter—is that such a solution is no longer available, politically, for a number of reasons. I could go into a lot of them, but the principal one is the decline of organized labor. Labor union membership, the muscle behind progressive politics, was at its peak of around 35 percent just after the war, but is now down to the 11 percent range (and the 6 percent range in the private sector). Liberal reform now lacks an institutional basis. So that’s a picture of decay, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out.
Gar S: You argue that “evolutionary reconstruction” does not flow from reform or revolution but rather “from building institutions, workplaces and cultures concerned with democratizing wealth.” How significant are cooperative enterprises in today's economy. Could you describe the current state of America's cooperative economy?
Gar A: Given that the economy is unlikely to truly collapse and provoke explosive change—for all the reasons I have indicated—and given that a “reform” solution like the New Deal is extremely difficult in the absence of a strong institutional power base for liberalism (e.g. labor unions), we face an extremely unusual political situation. I believe we are entering an extended period, a multi-decade period, in which the dominant reality is likely to be one of erratic growth, stagnation, periodic inflation, substantial political stalemate and decay.
In such a context, the prospects for near-term change are obviously not great—especially when such change is conceived in traditional terms. On the other hand, for precisely such reasons, there is likely to be an intensified process of much deeper probing, much more serious political analysis, and much more fundamental institutional exploration and development. In fact, this is already well underway. Beneath the surface level of politics-as-usual, continuing political stalemate and the exhaustion of existing approaches have begun to open up some very interesting strategic possibilities. These are best understood as neither “reforms” (policies to modify and control, but not transcend, current corporate-dominated institutions) nor “revolution” (the overthrowing of current institutions), but rather a longer-term process of “evolutionary reconstruction”—that is, institutional transformation that unfolds over time.
Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public (rather than “the one percent”) increasingly comes to own more and more of the nation’s productive assets. As the old system decays, an evolutionary reconstruction would see the foundations of a new system gradually rising and replacing failing elements of the old.
Though the press doesn’t much cover this, such processes are already observable in many parts of the current American system. Some numbers: There are now ten thousand worker-owned companies of one kind or another in the country. And they are expanding over time, and they’re becoming more democratic rather than less. There are 130 million people who are members of one or another form of cooperative. A quarter of American electricity is produced by either municipal ownership or cooperatives. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is, in other words, “socialized.” There are neighborhood corporations, land trusts, and other municipal and state strategies. One can observe such a dynamic developing in the central neighborhoods of some of the nation’s larger cities, places that have consistently suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. In such neighborhoods, democratizing development has gone forward, paradoxically, precisely because traditional policies have been politically impossible.
All this has been building in scale and sophistication to the point that growing numbers of people now talk about a “New Economy.” It doesn’t yet compare to the giants of Wall Street and the corporate economy, of course. But it is growing to the point where challenges are also becoming possible. Move Your Money campaigns have seen billions transferred out of Wall Street banks into credit unions and local and community banks. If you add up the credit unions they are the equivalent of one of the largest US banks, knocking Goldman Sachs out of the top five.
I see this era as something akin to the decades before the New Deal, the time when experimentation
and development in the state and local “laboratories of democracy” laid down the principles and programs that became the basis for much larger national policies when the right political moment occurred.
Gar S: You clearly show that regulating Wall Street doesn’t work and breaking up large banks is unlikely to last. The conservative Chicago School of Economics, you point out, had a solution: essentially any business “too big to regulate”” should be nationalized. “Take them over; turn them into public utilities.” Could large banks really be taken over and transformed?
Gar A: The old conservative economists were right: Regulation doesn’t work; they capture the regulators. Anti-trust doesn’t work; if you break them up, they re-group. Look at Standard Oil. Look at AT&T and the telephone companies. In fact, the major banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” They imperil the entire economy. So ultimately the only answer, logically, is to take them over at some point. Milton Friedman’s revered teacher, H.C. Simons, the founder of the conservative Chicago School of economics, was one of the first to point out this logic. He argued that this was necessary because it was the only way to preserve a genuinely free economy.
Can it be done? We just did it in one form: In response to the financial crisis the federal government essentially nationalized General Motors and A.I.G. and was in a position to do the same with Chrysler and several major banks because of the huge injections of public capital that were required to save them from bankruptcy. At one point, Obama frankly told the bankers that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks. What happens when the next financial crisis occurs (as most observers on left, right and center think inevitable)? Or the one after that?
There are also already alternative models at hand. Most people don't realize this, but the federal government currently runs 140 different government banks. They aren’t always called banks, although sometimes they are, like the Export-Import Bank and the National Cooperative Bank. But sometimes they take the form of small business loans programs or agricultural programs. Then there is the Bank of North Dakota, a public bank that has been there for ninety years. It's a state-owned bank, very popular with small business but also labor. Twenty states have introduced legislation to create public banks of their own. States have huge tax flows, which could capitalize such banks. Once you start to look more carefully, beneath the surface of media attention, it may be that far more is possible much earlier and much faster than many now imagine.
Gar S: If you don’t like corporate capitalism or state socialism, what’s left? Shouldn’t a fundamental goal be to prevent accumulations of great wealth. Once great wealth or power is attained, there is a tendency to fear the majority and seek to protect one’s fortune at all costs.
Gar A: That is a fair question, and most people don’t face it squarely: “If you don’t like corporate capitalism, where the corporations dominate the political system, and you don’t like state socialism, where the state dominates the system by virtue of its ownership, what do you want?” I think the developments reported on in the book point towards something very American, something that might be called “a community sustaining system”—one in which national structures and regional structures and local structures are all oriented to producing healthy local community economies, and thereby healthy and ecologically sustainable democratic communities.
We are at a very remarkable moment in American history: Even as we face massive economic, social and environmental challenges, more and more people are beginning to see that politics as usual doesn’t work, that the problems are fundamental to the system itself. These issues are on the table for the first time in many decades. So there needs to be an answer at some point, in terms of system design, to the question of what a system looks like that isn’t corporate capitalism and isn’t state socialism but begins with community and how we build it.
The truly central question is who gets to own the nation’s wealth? Because it’s not only an economic question, it determines politics in large part. The corporate capitalist system lodges such power in the corporations and tiny elites. An alternative system must begin at the bottom and democratize ownership from the bottom up—all the way from small co-ops and neighborhood corporations on up through city and state institutions and even, when necessary, regionally and nationally.
I think we can see the outlines of such a model already emerging in developments in the New Economy. It might be called a “Pluralist Commonwealth.” Plural forms of common wealth ownership. Worker ownership, co-ops, municipal utilities, neighborhood land trusts, state ownership of certain national firms. Plural forms. It’s not very sexy language, but it attempts to get to the idea that you must change ownership of wealth in many different ways in order to achieve democratic results and achieve cultural changes that allow us a democratic solution to the systemic problem. The key thing is that just below the surface of media attention a great deal is going on—many, many new developments that move in the direction of democratic ownership, starting at the very grass roots level, and moving up.
All of this ultimately also puts “the system question” on the table. We need a serious and wide-ranging debate around a broader menu of institutional possibilities for America’s future than the stale choices commonly discussed on both left and right.
Gar Alperovitz, currently a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been writing books about wealth, democracy and national security for 48 years. In addition to serving in several government posts (including Special Assistant in the US State Department), Alperovitz is a founding principle of The Democracy Collaborative and a boardmember at the New Economics Institute.
What Then Must We Do? (his latest book and his twelfth since 1965) is a breezy, conversational read filled with somber forecasts, hopeful alternative economic strategies and lots of surprising facts and stats (Some examples: If the nation's personal wealth were divided evenly, a family of four would receive $200,000 a year. The hourly US minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is now $2 less than it was in 1968. The US is such a large country "You can tuck Germany into Montana!")
What Then Must We Do? (the title is borrowed from Tolstoy) explores a challenging premise: "The coming painful decades may be the prehistory of the next American revolution – and an evolutionary process that transforms the American system, making it both morally meaningful and ecologically sustainable."
Daniel Ellsberg calls this book possibly "the most important movement-building book of the new century" and Juliet Schor, author of True Wealth, hails it as "the most compelling account yet of how we can move beyond the piecemeal, project–by–project transformation of our political economy to truly systemic change."
Alperovitz recently took time from his busy schedule to discuss the arguments in his new book and explore the ramifications of social and economic change in an era of pending systemic collapse.
Gar S: You point out that 400 plutocrats in the US now own more wealth than 180 million other Americans. A scale of inequality that ranks as “medieval.” Shortly before his assassination, Dr. King noted America's problems could not be solved without “undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”
Gar A: The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that's the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
You mentioned Martin Luther King, citing some of the quotes I included in the book. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and we will be doubtless be hearing a lot about that and Dr. King’s leadership on racial equality and civil rights. I worked with him on neighborhood ownership questions we were looking at in the Senate at the time; and then again, a few years later, when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was also questioning the distribution of wealth, citing the “triple evils” of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. At the end, right before he was assassinated, he even began to talk about changing the economic power structure, even occasionally, using the words “democratic socialism.” In this era of difficulty we would do well to remember Dr. King as a visionary who was beginning to step out beyond the cramped consensus to ask far deeper questions about the nature of America and the possibilities for a different future for this country. That is our challenge today.
Gar S: You argue that it was not politics but circumstance (the Great Depression, followed by WW II) that precipitated the New Deal's progressive change and the country’s post-war economic prosperity. I was surprised by your assessment that an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression is no longer likely. Could you explain?
Gar A: Despite the systemic problems a crisis collapse of the scope and scale of the Great Depression is not likely. Here are a few reasons. First, the size of ongoing government spending stabilizing the economy is much, much larger than it was at the time of the Great Depression. Government spending—the floor under the private economy, if you like—was at 11 percent in 1929, now it is roughly 30 to 35 percent of the economy (depending on the year, and whether we are in recession.) The economy may decline rapidly, but the floor is three times higher than it was during the 1930s. Second, today we have built-in economic “stabilizers”—spending that kicks in to help offset the decline when recessions begin to get underway: unemployment insurance, food stamps, and so on. Then there is the sea change in politics. The American public now holds political leaders responsible for making sure the economy works—or at least does not totally fail. There is a heavy political price for any politician who fails to deal with truly massive economic pain. Perhaps most importantly, when push comes to shove, major corporate leaders also support action to counteract truly major economic contractions. You saw it in 2008 and 2009 when business leaders demanded action—including the stimulus plan.
So massive and sustained economic collapse of the kind that opened the way for extremely unusual and far-reaching policy change in the Great Depression and New Deal era, though not impossible, is no longer likely. This is not to say great recessions, ongoing economic pain, and high unemployment may not occur for long periods of time. Indeed, that is what we face at present.
Gar S: The new word for economic performance is no longer “growth” but “stagnation.” One percent of the country controls so much wealth but—unlike the middle class and working poor—the rich don't spend a significant part of their wealth.
Gar A: This prospect of stagnation—or “punctuated stagnation,” as I write (there may be small intermittent upticks; plus oil and other commodity price explosions)—is very important to grasp. I believe (along with many observers) that we are entering an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. One problem is lack of demand in Keynesian terms, but I think it’s far deeper than that. We are returning to a pattern of stagnation that was common before the Depression collapse, on the one hand, and the extremely unusual conditions that prevailed during the postwar economic boom, on the other.
A short form of the argument would be this: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, up to World War I, there was decay, decline, and indeed major recession and almost depression. We don’t know what would have happened; World War I intervened, bailing out the economy. Same story with the Great Depression: World War II, not the New Deal, solved the economic problem in the second quarter of the century. In the third quarter of the century the post-war economic boom—brought about partly by savings built up during the war, partly by military spending in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the big military budgets of the Cold War, and partly because US competitors (Germany, Japan, and many others) had been significantly destroyed—was an extremely unusual boom moment—the greatest sustained boom in our history. But thereafter the pattern of economic difficulty resumed in the final quarter of the century. Even though military budgets are high today in absolute terms, they are comparatively small as a share of GDP. And I think nuclear weapons now preclude an industrial-scale global war like World War I or World War II. We can have small horrible wars, but they don’t function economically in the way that larger wars did previously.
Now these difficulties could be resolved if you had sufficient political power to mount a traditional Keynesian solution. But what is significant—and this is the heart of the matter—is that such a solution is no longer available, politically, for a number of reasons. I could go into a lot of them, but the principal one is the decline of organized labor. Labor union membership, the muscle behind progressive politics, was at its peak of around 35 percent just after the war, but is now down to the 11 percent range (and the 6 percent range in the private sector). Liberal reform now lacks an institutional basis. So that’s a picture of decay, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out.
Gar S: You argue that “evolutionary reconstruction” does not flow from reform or revolution but rather “from building institutions, workplaces and cultures concerned with democratizing wealth.” How significant are cooperative enterprises in today's economy. Could you describe the current state of America's cooperative economy?
Gar A: Given that the economy is unlikely to truly collapse and provoke explosive change—for all the reasons I have indicated—and given that a “reform” solution like the New Deal is extremely difficult in the absence of a strong institutional power base for liberalism (e.g. labor unions), we face an extremely unusual political situation. I believe we are entering an extended period, a multi-decade period, in which the dominant reality is likely to be one of erratic growth, stagnation, periodic inflation, substantial political stalemate and decay.
In such a context, the prospects for near-term change are obviously not great—especially when such change is conceived in traditional terms. On the other hand, for precisely such reasons, there is likely to be an intensified process of much deeper probing, much more serious political analysis, and much more fundamental institutional exploration and development. In fact, this is already well underway. Beneath the surface level of politics-as-usual, continuing political stalemate and the exhaustion of existing approaches have begun to open up some very interesting strategic possibilities. These are best understood as neither “reforms” (policies to modify and control, but not transcend, current corporate-dominated institutions) nor “revolution” (the overthrowing of current institutions), but rather a longer-term process of “evolutionary reconstruction”—that is, institutional transformation that unfolds over time.
Like reform, evolutionary reconstruction involves step-by-step nonviolent change. But like revolution, evolutionary reconstruction changes the basic institutions of ownership of the economy, so that the broad public (rather than “the one percent”) increasingly comes to own more and more of the nation’s productive assets. As the old system decays, an evolutionary reconstruction would see the foundations of a new system gradually rising and replacing failing elements of the old.
Though the press doesn’t much cover this, such processes are already observable in many parts of the current American system. Some numbers: There are now ten thousand worker-owned companies of one kind or another in the country. And they are expanding over time, and they’re becoming more democratic rather than less. There are 130 million people who are members of one or another form of cooperative. A quarter of American electricity is produced by either municipal ownership or cooperatives. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is, in other words, “socialized.” There are neighborhood corporations, land trusts, and other municipal and state strategies. One can observe such a dynamic developing in the central neighborhoods of some of the nation’s larger cities, places that have consistently suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. In such neighborhoods, democratizing development has gone forward, paradoxically, precisely because traditional policies have been politically impossible.
All this has been building in scale and sophistication to the point that growing numbers of people now talk about a “New Economy.” It doesn’t yet compare to the giants of Wall Street and the corporate economy, of course. But it is growing to the point where challenges are also becoming possible. Move Your Money campaigns have seen billions transferred out of Wall Street banks into credit unions and local and community banks. If you add up the credit unions they are the equivalent of one of the largest US banks, knocking Goldman Sachs out of the top five.
I see this era as something akin to the decades before the New Deal, the time when experimentation
and development in the state and local “laboratories of democracy” laid down the principles and programs that became the basis for much larger national policies when the right political moment occurred.
Gar S: You clearly show that regulating Wall Street doesn’t work and breaking up large banks is unlikely to last. The conservative Chicago School of Economics, you point out, had a solution: essentially any business “too big to regulate”” should be nationalized. “Take them over; turn them into public utilities.” Could large banks really be taken over and transformed?
Gar A: The old conservative economists were right: Regulation doesn’t work; they capture the regulators. Anti-trust doesn’t work; if you break them up, they re-group. Look at Standard Oil. Look at AT&T and the telephone companies. In fact, the major banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” They imperil the entire economy. So ultimately the only answer, logically, is to take them over at some point. Milton Friedman’s revered teacher, H.C. Simons, the founder of the conservative Chicago School of economics, was one of the first to point out this logic. He argued that this was necessary because it was the only way to preserve a genuinely free economy.
Can it be done? We just did it in one form: In response to the financial crisis the federal government essentially nationalized General Motors and A.I.G. and was in a position to do the same with Chrysler and several major banks because of the huge injections of public capital that were required to save them from bankruptcy. At one point, Obama frankly told the bankers that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks. What happens when the next financial crisis occurs (as most observers on left, right and center think inevitable)? Or the one after that?
There are also already alternative models at hand. Most people don't realize this, but the federal government currently runs 140 different government banks. They aren’t always called banks, although sometimes they are, like the Export-Import Bank and the National Cooperative Bank. But sometimes they take the form of small business loans programs or agricultural programs. Then there is the Bank of North Dakota, a public bank that has been there for ninety years. It's a state-owned bank, very popular with small business but also labor. Twenty states have introduced legislation to create public banks of their own. States have huge tax flows, which could capitalize such banks. Once you start to look more carefully, beneath the surface of media attention, it may be that far more is possible much earlier and much faster than many now imagine.
Gar S: If you don’t like corporate capitalism or state socialism, what’s left? Shouldn’t a fundamental goal be to prevent accumulations of great wealth. Once great wealth or power is attained, there is a tendency to fear the majority and seek to protect one’s fortune at all costs.
Gar A: That is a fair question, and most people don’t face it squarely: “If you don’t like corporate capitalism, where the corporations dominate the political system, and you don’t like state socialism, where the state dominates the system by virtue of its ownership, what do you want?” I think the developments reported on in the book point towards something very American, something that might be called “a community sustaining system”—one in which national structures and regional structures and local structures are all oriented to producing healthy local community economies, and thereby healthy and ecologically sustainable democratic communities.
We are at a very remarkable moment in American history: Even as we face massive economic, social and environmental challenges, more and more people are beginning to see that politics as usual doesn’t work, that the problems are fundamental to the system itself. These issues are on the table for the first time in many decades. So there needs to be an answer at some point, in terms of system design, to the question of what a system looks like that isn’t corporate capitalism and isn’t state socialism but begins with community and how we build it.
The truly central question is who gets to own the nation’s wealth? Because it’s not only an economic question, it determines politics in large part. The corporate capitalist system lodges such power in the corporations and tiny elites. An alternative system must begin at the bottom and democratize ownership from the bottom up—all the way from small co-ops and neighborhood corporations on up through city and state institutions and even, when necessary, regionally and nationally.
I think we can see the outlines of such a model already emerging in developments in the New Economy. It might be called a “Pluralist Commonwealth.” Plural forms of common wealth ownership. Worker ownership, co-ops, municipal utilities, neighborhood land trusts, state ownership of certain national firms. Plural forms. It’s not very sexy language, but it attempts to get to the idea that you must change ownership of wealth in many different ways in order to achieve democratic results and achieve cultural changes that allow us a democratic solution to the systemic problem. The key thing is that just below the surface of media attention a great deal is going on—many, many new developments that move in the direction of democratic ownership, starting at the very grass roots level, and moving up.
All of this ultimately also puts “the system question” on the table. We need a serious and wide-ranging debate around a broader menu of institutional possibilities for America’s future than the stale choices commonly discussed on both left and right.
The Deeply Embarrassing Senator of the Week Award
And now it’s time to present the Viewpoint award for the deeply embarrassing
senator of the week.
Never easy to narrow it down to just one, but this week the honors go to Georgia’s own, Saxby Chambliss. Who famously ran for senate in ‘02 against Democrat Max Cleland, a guy that lost 3 limbs in Vietnam — a war Saxby supported, but got student and medical deferments to avoid serving in.
Fortunately Saxby released a TV ad showing actual war hero Cleland side by side with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, thereby, electing Saxby in a landmark moment in American political toolery.
Never easy to narrow it down to just one, but this week the honors go to Georgia’s own, Saxby Chambliss. Who famously ran for senate in ‘02 against Democrat Max Cleland, a guy that lost 3 limbs in Vietnam — a war Saxby supported, but got student and medical deferments to avoid serving in.
Fortunately Saxby released a TV ad showing actual war hero Cleland side by side with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, thereby, electing Saxby in a landmark moment in American political toolery.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Lawrence O'Donnell on Rudy Giuliani's rewrite of history
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani cited his terrorism experience
in criticizing security failures in the Benghazi attack. In his Rewrite
segment, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out what Giuliani did–and
did not do– before 9/11.
Cenk Uygur's response to the NSA cell phone scandal: ‘Barack Obama is a liar.’
In light of the reports that the National Security Administration has been
collecting information from American citizens’ cell phones, Cenk calls out
President Obama for false campaign promises to fight terrorism while protecting
our privacy and civil liberties.
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Obama promised in 2008. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…that’s not who we are.”
“Well, that’s not who we’re supposed to be, but that’s exactly who Barack Obama is,” Cenk says.
“He lied. It’s not subtle. He said ‘there will be no spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.’ He lied. There is spying on all of us, and we are not suspected of a crime. Barack Obama is a liar.”
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” Obama promised in 2008. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…that’s not who we are.”
“Well, that’s not who we’re supposed to be, but that’s exactly who Barack Obama is,” Cenk says.
“He lied. It’s not subtle. He said ‘there will be no spying on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.’ He lied. There is spying on all of us, and we are not suspected of a crime. Barack Obama is a liar.”
Thursday, June 6, 2013
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