Monday, 9 February 2009

Obama, Day 20: The Torturer’s Wall

by Harry Haller at 6:44 pm | 1 Yowl

At this moment I am so deeply, bitterly disappointed in the Obama administration that I lack the words to express my contempt for the decision made by the justice department to continue cloaking torture and extreme rendition in secrecy. Ultimately, I blame myself for trusting another worthless politician and believing, even for a moment, that the Constitution had real worth and Barack Obama loved it as much as I do.

Andrew Sullivan:

This is a depressing sign that the Obama administration will protect the Bush-Cheney torture regime from the light of day. And with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in them.

Glenn Greenwald:

What this is clearly about is shielding the U.S. Government and Bush officials from any accountability. Worse, by keeping Bush’s secrecy architecture in place, it ensures that any future President — Obama or any other — can continue to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, with no transparency or accountability even for blatantly criminal acts.

It appears Patrick Leahy is our last hope.

I am most offended that Obama’s people chose to pursue this as the nation’s eyes were turned to the economy — just as Bush might have done.

What change? What hope?

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$500,000 Asshats

by Harry Haller at 4:44 pm | 1 Yowl

I’ve been in a pretty good mood all afternoon. The sun is warm. The house is quiet. I’ve cranked out another chapter in the Oprah novel.

Then I made the mistake of reading Allen Salkin’s “You Try to Live on 500K in This Town” for The New York Times.

Are you kidding me?!

“As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable,” said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, The Manny, and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. “Five hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale.”

My response? So what?!

When the federal government gives billions of dollars in funds to otherwise failed financial institutions and the choice is $500,000 or $0, which is the logical selection? $500,000 and whining? A salary more than 12 times the nation’s median income and the executives are whining?

My guess is for every $500,000 crybaby sitting at a desk in Citicorp, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of equally qualified but poorly connected wannabes who would gladly take the position at the same salary. Maybe they’re folks who would have kept floundering financials out of the mess they’re in now.

If you expect sympathy from people who have just lost their jobs because the government had no funds to bail out Circuit City, Blockbuster, or Claire’s Stores, good luck. Just suck it up and be glad you aren’t out on the streets, pounding the pavement for a job.

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Post: Apologize, Mr. Cheney

by Harry Haller at 2:13 pm | 1 Yowl

The Washington Post surprised me today with an editorial calling on former vice president Dick Cheney to apologize for “defending the extreme Bush administration policies on detention and interrogation that he championed.” After accusing Cheney of “mischaracterizing” President Barack Obama’s position on terrorists’ civil rights, the Post goes for the throat:

Most profoundly, Mr. Cheney fails to recognize the damage these policies have done to the country’s reputation at large. They have alienated even once-stalwart allies, and they have played into the hands of terrorist leaders, who use the sordid images from Abu Ghraib and tales of abuse at secret CIA prisons overseas as political ammunition to recruit the next wave of suicide bombers and foot soldiers. Thanks to Mr. Cheney and his allies, global respect for the United States is at a low point. Part of the mission of preventing attacks must be to repair that damage.

Ouch! It seems some of the paper’s editors must be watching “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” during their off hours. I’m impressed.

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Centrists Eviscerate Stimulus

by Harry Haller at 1:18 pm | Be the first

Paul Krugman is justifiably angry today. I’m reasonably certain he would have entitled his latest op-ed installment “Centrist, My Ass” if he could have squeaked it past The New York Times editors. His anger is contagious, and I am not nearly as polite, so I think it best I swallow my invective and defer to him:

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

Is this a better bill? No. Will it boost the economy? Maybe long enough to get “centrists” reelected. Should President Barack Obama sign a bill that has been largely eviscerated? I’d say no.

Call their bluff. Make them filibuster. Then they will be exposed as the enemies of the working class they truly are.

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Kissing to Be Clever

by Harry Haller at 12:18 pm | 2 Howls

Romeo and Juliet
Image via Wikipedia

With all due deference to my gay friends and family, after reading the U.K. Telegraph article, “Kissing feels so pleasurable due to hormone surge, find scientists,” I now understand why a man would prefer a man over a woman: It’s less complicated.

The study showed that women need more than just a kiss to experience the same chemical high as men - with additional features such as a romantic atmosphere of dimmed lights and mood music also required.

Don’t get me wrong. I savor women, and I don’t anticipate jumping the rails any time soon. But even science now acknowledges women are far more complex than men. So I will scoff at the next woman who coyly suggests to me that her needs/wants/desires are simple. And I will laugh out loud in the face of the next man who insists he understands women.

As the late Waylon Jennings was fond of saying, “Any man who understands women is one.”

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Mexican Drug Gangs Threaten Before Executing Police

by Harry Haller at 11:31 am | 1 Yowl

Not quite a month ago a Rolling Stone story about the drug wars in Mexico caught my eye as I sat with a friend in a tire store. Apparently stakes have elevated since then and drug gangs are resorting to new forms of terrorism. As Lizbeth Diaz at Reuters reports, law enforcement agents are now threatened with death over police radio frequencies before being executed.

“You’re next, bastard … We’re going to get you,” an unidentified drug gang member said over the police radio in the city of Tijuana after naming a policeman.

The man also threatened a second cop by name and played foot-stomping “narcocorrido” music, popular with drug cartels, over the airwaves.

“No one can help them,” an officer named Jorge said of his threatened colleagues as he heard the threats in his patrol car.

Sure enough, two hours later the dead bodies of the two named policemen were found dumped on the edge of the city, their hands tied and bullet wounds in their heads.

Another chilling story from a genuine profit-fueled war on drugs the Mexican government is apparently losing.

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“Bibi” to “Harness” U.S. Administration

by Harry Haller at 10:14 am | Be the first

Call me anti-Semitic if you will, but when a candidate running for high office in another country refers to the current U.S. administration as something he can “harness” as, say, one harnesses a workhorse or a plow mule, I am offended. As former president Bill Clinton observed, “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Deeply disturbing.

It’s not just the possibility that a [Benyamin] Netanyahu-led government would seek to “topple” Hamas — something that would require another, even bloodier Israeli invasion and leave its army stuck in the territory indefinitely. Netanyahu is also saying a top priority will be “harnessing the U.S. administration to stop the threat” of Iran’s nuclear program — something he strongly suggests would require military action. He advocates putting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on hold indefinitely and says he will not stop the expansion of Jewish settlements. He has never endorsed the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, and he says he will not support Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights — the key to any peace deal with Syria. One possible coalition partner, now surging in the polls, is Avigdor Lieberman, a far-right leader who advocates harsh discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority.

It is my understanding that the United States is a sovereign nation, and if we are going to risk the lives of our troops, it should be in our own defense and not at the whim of a megalomaniacal foreign prime minister with an itch for war and a longing for genocide.

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Sunday, 8 February 2009

Spreading the Wealth Around — Upwardly

by Harry Haller at 9:50 pm | Be the first

Consider Dean Baker’s “Dealing With BANKRUPT Banks: Nationalization or Welfare” a codicil to the previous post. Baker underscores my assertion that Treasury is deliberately buying bad assets at inflated prices:

The Post editorial page carried on with this deception. An editorial on saving the banks dismissed nationalization because it would involve the government in running the banks. Then it discusses the idea of buying bad assets and warns, “but there is a huge risk that the government would badly overpay in the first place.”

Actually, this is not a risk, this is the point. If the government paid the market price for these assets the banks would be bankrupt and we would be back to step 1, nationalization. The point of buying the bad assets is to pay too much, so that the banks can get enough money to stay solvent. (It is worth noting that deciding how much the government will overpay, and to whom, also involves the government in running the banks in a really big way.)

It would be nice if the Post and the rest of the media would report honestly on the bank bailout and stop trying to conceal plans for a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives.

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Obama, Days 18 & 19: Timmy and the TARP

by Harry Haller at 8:47 pm | 1 Yowl

Timothy F.
Image via Wikipedia

Among the cartoons in the February 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker is a depiction of an apron-sporting matron standing on the steps at the back door of a frame house, looking down at a collie with a financial chart clutched in its mouth. Whatever is being tracked by the chart is in steep decline. The trend line is plummeting. The woman asks, “What is it Lassie — is Timmy in trouble?”
If the Timmy in question is Timothy Geithner, Lassie should bark “NO.” As U.S. Treasury Secretary, he’ll earn an annual income of $191,300, or more than four times the nation’s median income (for those who have jobs). Once he leaves office he’ll be snatched up at a much greater salary by a financial firm looking for a little government leverage. In the meantime, he’ll wield enormous power over the nation’s wealth. No, ma’am (as a polite individual should always address cartoon matrons), Timmy Geithner is sitting in the catbird’s seat.
The nation’s economy, on the other hand, is over the cliff, hanging by the merest thread, and a whole pack of Lassies aided by the cast of “Emergency!” couldn’t pull it back to safety. Or, as Paul Krugman said in his “On the Edge” column on Thursday, “Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get back out again.”
But even as Congress is arguing about a stimulus package to snatch the economy from the precipice, the banking industry at the heart of the crisis has run through $350 billion, is about to run through $350 billion more, and will likely require yet another jolt of federal funds. Where has the money gone? One look at the transactions report on the U.S. Treasury Web site, and many of the recipients names are familiar: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo, to name a few. What we’ve purchased also has a familiar ring — mostly preferred stock with warrants at par value.

Continued after the jump

Obama, Days 18 & 19: Timmy and the TARP

by Harry Haller at 8:47 pm | Be the first

Timothy F.
Image via Wikipedia

Among the cartoons in the February 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker is a depiction of an apron-sporting matron standing on the steps at the back door of a frame house, looking down at a collie with a financial chart clutched in its mouth. Whatever is being tracked by the chart is in steep decline. The trend line is plummeting. The woman asks, “What is it Lassie — is Timmy in trouble?”

If the Timmy in question is Timothy Geithner, Lassie should bark “NO.” As U.S. Treasury Secretary, he’ll earn an annual income of $191,300, or more than four times the nation’s median income (for those who have jobs). Once he leaves office he’ll be snatched up at a much greater salary by a financial firm looking for a little government leverage. In the meantime, he’ll wield enormous power over the nation’s wealth. No, ma’am (as a polite individual should always address cartoon matrons), Timmy Geithner is sitting in the catbird’s seat.

The nation’s economy, on the other hand, is over the cliff, hanging by the merest thread, and a whole pack of Lassies aided by the cast of “Emergency!” couldn’t pull it back to safety. Or, as Paul Krugman said in his “On the Edge” column on Thursday, “Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get back out again.”

But even as Congress is arguing about a stimulus package to snatch the economy from the precipice, the banking industry at the heart of the crisis has run through $350 billion, is about to run through $350 billion more, and will likely require yet another jolt of federal funds. Where has the money gone? One look at the transactions report on the U.S. Treasury Web site, and many of the recipients names are familiar: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo, to name a few. What we’ve purchased also has a familiar ring — mostly preferred stock with warrants at par value.

Continued after the jump

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