Posts Tagged ‘Bush’

26 Jan

Vision: How We Can Beat Conservatives With Progressive Culture |

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , .

The American Prospect / By Jeff Chang and Brian Komar

Culture is where people make sense of the world, where ideas are introduced and emotions are attached to concrete change. Let’s bring it into our political cause.

January 26, 2011  |  

On Nov. 3, progressives awoke to find that they had returned to 2004. Despite important legislative victories, Democrats had been outflanked. Republicans had successfully sold themselves as the party of economic growth, the party of the angry out-of-work American, and, most dissonantly, the party of change. They owned the narrative and won big.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the dark days following George W. Bush’s re-election, frustrated progressives set out to build an enduring movement that would effectively advance and communicate their ideas, policies, and values. Funders and strategists created new institutions and scaled up existing ones, including think tanks, civic-engagement organizations, and media-watchdog groups. These institutions played a key role in the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress, the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and the passage of parts of the Obama platform in 2009 and 2010.

Yet as progressives watched Democrats suffer the worst election loss since the Republican collapse of 1948, they seemed to be back where they started. Just as in 2004, many have blamed the losses on ineffective Democratic campaign messaging. The problem, however, runs much deeper. Electoral and Beltway politics are episodic, short-term, and transactional. Movements, however, are long-term. “Public sentiment is everything,” Abraham Lincoln once said. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” In other words, movements must change hearts and minds in an enduring way. They must change the culture.

Culture is the space in our national consciousness filled by music, books, sports, movies, theater, visual arts, and media. It is the realm of ideas, images, and stories — the narrative in which we are immersed every day. It is where people make sense of the world, where ideas are introduced, values are inculcated, and emotions are attached to concrete change. Cultural change is often the dress rehearsal for political change. Or put in another way, political change is the final manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred. Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Major League Baseball debut preceded Brown v. Board of Education by seven years. Ellen DeGeneres’ coming-out on her TV sitcom preceded the first favorable court ruling on same-sex marriage by eight years. Until progressives make culture an integral and intentional part of their theory of change, they will not be able to compete effectively against conservatives.

Conservatives have long recognized the role that culture plays in shaping public sentiment and building movements. Created in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities first aimed to discredit the arts program of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, then went on to blacklist hundreds of writers, public intellectuals, musicians, directors, producers, and actors. Glenn Beck’s and Andrew Breitbart’s attacks on progressives in the arts, the media, and the federal agencies that impact those areas are a 21st-century echo.

The modern conservative movement built an infrastructure to deploy its own cultural strategy. In a famous 1971 memo, corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell argued that the time when a policy elite — the political leaders, wonks, and the chattering class — could advance ideas and shape debate was ending. Instead of catering to this elite, conservatives formed alternative media networks that bypassed mainstream-media gatekeepers and allowed them to communicate their stories to the American public directly. Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly are the products of this four-decade investment. Now conservatives dominate both the top-10 cable-news programs and the top-10 AM talk-radio shows. The trinity of Limbaugh, Beck, and Sean Hannity commands 40 million radio listeners alone — an audience that eclipses CNN and MSNBC’s combined prime-time viewership.

30 Nov

Wikileaks provides the truth Bush obscured

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , .

WashingtonPost.com
by Richard Cohen

Iraq now has a Shiite-dominated government and many senior officials who are ominously friendly with Iran. It was always American policy to use Saddam’s Iraq to counterbalance Iran since it was really Iran that posed a danger to the region. That danger is now amply documented in the new WikiLeaks documents – including the revelation that North Korea has sold Iran missiles capable of reaching, say, Tel Aviv or, a minute or so later, Cairo.

To a certain extent, the leaked documents contain the rawest form of gossip. It is amusing to learn that Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is psychologically gridlocked with all sorts of neurotic tics and will not travel without his Ukrainian nurse, described as a “voluptuous blonde.” It is good to see that parody of a blowhard, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, characterized as being in the pocket of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and fun to wonder, in a Scrooge McDuck moment, how Afghanistan’s vice president was able to take $52 million in cash out of the country and get it through customs in the United Arab Emirates last year when you and I get stopped for having a small bottle of shampoo. Something’s wrong here, I suspect.

The Arab world’s alarm at the imminence of an Iranian bomb is on full display in the leaked documents – as is the Obama administration’s methodical and effective attempts to isolate Tehran. Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah implored Washington to “cut off the head of the snake” while there was still time, and the United Arab Emirates “agreed with [U.S. Gen. John P.] Abizaid that Iran’s new President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad seemed unbalanced, crazy even.” Some months later the Emirates’ defense chief, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, told Abizaid that the United States needed to take action against Iran “this year or next.” If cables from Jordan and Egypt could be read, they would be no different. The (Sunni) Arab world loathes and fears Iran on sectarian grounds and also because it espouses a revolutionary doctrine of the sort that kings and dictators find disquieting.

This is the world George Bush left us. It exists everywhere but in his book, where facts are either omitted or rearranged so that the war in Iraq seems the product of pure reason. As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq’s weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. “I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war,” he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

The accumulating evidence at the time showed that Iraq lacked a nuclear weapons program and did not have biological weapons either. As for its chemical weapons program, while harder to ferret out, it not only no longer existed, but even if it had, it was insufficient reason to go to war. Poison gas has been around since the Second Battle of Ypres. That was 1915. “The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat,” Bush writes. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

Reading Bush’s book, seeing him in his various TV appearances, I keep thinking of Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister. In 1982, Begin took Israel to war in Lebanon. It cost Israel as many as 675 dead, 4,000 wounded and its image as invincible on the battlefield. Begin took responsibility. He resigned and became a recluse, a depressed and beaten man.

I suggest no such course for Bush — only that he read the WikiLeaks documents and, for the sake of history and the instruction it offers, reassess his vaunted decisions. His jejune approach to decision-making – know yourself but not necessarily the facts – is downright repellent. On the book’s dust jacket, Bush is shown in a ranching outfit. A Peter Pan outfit would have been more fitting. Like him, Bush has never grown up.

cohenr@washpost.com

9 Jun

Cheney’s Culture Of Deregulation And Corruption

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , .

How Bush Administration Inaction Created the BP Disaster

A look at the culture of deregulation, self-regulation, and corruption ushered in on Cheney’s underscores why the BP oil catastrophe should forever be remembered as Cheney’s Katrina.

SOURCE: AP/Cliff Owen
By Joshua Dorner | June 9, 2010

Big Oil spent millions of dollars to sweep—and keep—George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House. And it got its money’s worth.

The new administration and its staunchly pro-oil congressional allies returned the favor by enacting one of the most pro-oil, anti-environment pieces of legislation in history: the Energy Policy Act of 2005—itself based on the recommendations of Cheney’s secret energy policy task force. The Bush-Cheney administration’s cozy relationship with Big Oil, however, goes much deeper than one law.

A closer look at the culture of deregulation, self-regulation, and corruption ushered in on Cheney’s watch further underscores why the BP oil catastrophe should forever be remembered as Cheney’s Katrina.

The poster child for Bush-Cheney crony capitalism

The mention of Halliburton likely summons for most Americans memories of the Bush administration’s infamous no-bid Iraq war contracts—and Halliburton’s subsequent efforts to defraud taxpayers and its fatal negligence in facilities it constructed for our troops. Halliburton’s main business, however, is providing services to major oil companies such as its potentially faulty cementing job on BP’s blown out well.

The company had an unprecedented opportunity to engage in self-dealing and create a regulatory climate favorable to its business interests when Cheney, Halliburton’s former CEO, was ensconced in the White House and still effectively on its payroll.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has come to be known as the “Dick Cheney energy bill,” but there’s one provision that is so closely identified with the former vice president that it has become known as the “Cheney loophole.” The provision in question, Section 322, exempted hydraulic fracturing, a drilling process invented by Halliburton commonly known as “fracking,” from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The use of hydraulic fracturing has opened up vast new reserves of domestic natural gas from Texas to Wyoming to Pennsylvania, but serious environmental concerns about the process have been raised following numerous cases of groundwater contamination after nearby drilling. The exemption has placed the burden to rein in drillers largely on state regulators that are often unable or simply unwilling to police the thousands of wells that have been drilled in recent years.

Cheney not only offered permanent regulatory relief and rolled back existing environmental laws to help the oil industry. This particular example also demonstrates the administration’s willingness to distort science to benefit Big Oil and others. A 2004 Environmental Protection Agency study declared that fracking posed no significant threat to drinking water, thus paving the way for Congress to pass the Cheney loophole. The integrity of the 2004 study has been called into serious question, and a broad new Obama EPA study on the practice is raising the ire of the oil and gas industry.

The one exception to the Cheney loophole was a ban on injecting diesel fuel into wells. Yet a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation revealed that the drilling companies violated this single restriction with impunity during the Bush-Cheney years. And oil and gas interests have launched a public relations and lobbying campaign to prevent Congress from closing the Cheney loophole or imposing other regulations.

There have been two serious accidents involving onshore natural gas wells in the past week alone. A Pennsylvania well had a blowout and one in West Virginia exploded.

Categorically excluding oversight

One of the 2005 Energy Policy Act provisions that is most directly related to the BP oil catastrophe is Section 390, which dramatically expanded the circumstances under which new drilling permits could be approved without further environmental reviews or assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act. Many appear to have been approved based almost completely on responses to yes or no questions on pro forma checklists.

The Minerals Management Service approved BP’s blown out Mississippi Canyon 252 well using just such a “categorical exclusion.” BP was even lobbying to further expand use of such exemptions just 11 days before Deepwater Horizon exploded.

And expanding the use of such exclusions for onshore drilling is potentially devastating for some areas of the Intermountain West. A 2009 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for issuing drilling permits on federal lands, engaged in widespread abuse of categorical exclusions during the final two years of the Bush-Cheney administration. The report stated that the use of so-called “Section 390 categorical exclusions” created by the 2005 energy bill was “frequently out of compliance with both the law and BLM’s guidance.”

The GAO report found that the BLM approved nearly 6,100 permits from 2006 to 2008 using the new exemptions carved out by Cheney and his congressional allies. Field offices in Wyoming approved 2,462 such permits. In fact, the Pinedale, Wyoming BLM office alone granted an extraordinary 1,498 permits using Section 390 exclusions. This is more drilling permits than there were residents of the town in 2000—1412. Ground level ozone levels, largely related to the drilling boom in the area, measured in the tiny central Wyoming town have at times exceeded those of downtown Los Angeles. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar luckily announced onshore drilling reforms in January 2010 designed to end the abuse of Cheney exclusions on public lands.

But dramatic budget cuts and a lack of resources meanwhile prompted the BLM to briefly impose a moratorium on all new solar energy permits in 2008. The moratorium, which some argued would’ve killed the nascent solar industry, was eventually lifted after a massive outcry by industry officials, congressional leaders, and environmentalists.

A mile high at the Minerals Management Service

The culture of corruption and ethical lapses across the entire Bush-Cheney Department of the Interior is well documented. But the Minerals Management Service appears to have experienced a particularly stunning depth and breadth of corruption and simple incompetence. GAO reports have documented almost unbelievable allegations of drug use and improper relationships, payments, and gifts between Bush-Cheney-era MMS employees and the oil and gas industry that they were charged with overseeing.

The most recent GAO report, detailing problems in the Lake Charles, Louisiana office of the MMS, notes that the report’s findings were turned over the U.S. attorney for the western district of Louisiana in October 2009 and that the office declined to prosecute any of those involved in what would plainly appear to be numerous violations of the law.

The U.S. attorney for the western district of Louisiana from October 2001 to January 2010 was Donald Washington. His official Department of Justice biography noted that he had practiced “toxic tort litigation,” “held a variety of positions with Conoco Inc from 1982-1996,” and “served as Chief Counsel for Conoco’s Gulf of Mexico Division until his departure from Conoco in 1996.”

Washington has since returned to private practice in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he may again find himself involved in the ongoing catastrophe. The press release touting his hire at the firm Jones & Walker notes that he “will focus on complex civil litigation, federal and state criminal investigations, regulatory enforcement actions, and internal investigations and compliance programs in such industries as health care, maritime, and energy.”

Catastrophic cronyism

The so-called environmental assessments that laid the foundation for approving permits without further review were fatally flawed under the Bush-Cheney years—in addition to violating both the spirit and the letter of the law.

The last meaningful environmental review of any kind standing between BP and drilling at the Mississippi Canyon 252 site should have been the October 2007 Minerals Management Service environmental assessment of the “Proposed Gulf of Mexico OCS Oil and Gas Lease Sale 206.” But just six words—splashed in bold capital letters across the top of the report’s first page—paved the way for what is now the worst environmental calamity in the history of the United States: FINDING OF NO NEW SIGNIFICANT IMPACT.

The assessment points out that Hurricanes Rita and Katrina rendered beaches and marshes more vulnerable to spills, but it still concluded that the potential for a damaging spill as a result of leasing the 5,569 drilling blocks contained in proposed sale 206 was basically nil:

Concerns were raised related to…the potential effects of oil spills on tourism, emergency response capabilities, spill prevention…accidental discharges from both deepwater blowouts and pipeline ruptures…The fate and behavior of oil spills, availability and adequacy of oil-spill containment and cleanup technologies, oil-spill cleanup strategies, impacts of various oil-spill cleanup methods, effects of weathering on oil spills, toxicological effects of fresh and weathered oil, air pollution associated with spilled oil, and short-term and long-term impacts of oil on wetlands…Offshore oil spills resulting from proposed Lease Sale 206 are not expected to damage significantly any wetlands along the Gulf Coast.

The assessment also includes one passage that reads like something of a death certificate for the gulf’s coastal communities:

Accidental events associated with proposed Lease Sale 206 such as oil or chemical spills, blowouts, and vessel collisions would have no effects on the demographic characteristics of the Gulf coastal communities…As inland marshes and barrier islands erode or subside, without effective restoration efforts, the population in coastal communities in southern Louisiana is expected to shift to the more northern portions of the parishes and cause increasing populations in urban and suburban areas and declining populations in rural coastal areas.

Given that they appear to have considered the decline of the Gulf Coast’s communities a foregone conclusion, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Bush-Cheney administration officials exercised so little care in attempting to prevent an accident like the catastrophe now unfolding.

Cheney’s direct role in this situation of regulatory capture and failure could not be clearer. Randall Luthi signed the so-called environmental review for the proposed lease sale 206. He is a longtime Cheney insider who was installed as director of the Minerals Management Service in 2007. Luthi, who was once Cheney’s intern, went on to hold various positions in several Republican administrations before returning to his native Wyoming.

Luthi is currently the president of the National Ocean Industries Association, whose stated mission is “to secure reliable access and a fair regulatory and economic environment for the companies that develop the nation’s valuable offshore energy resources in an environmentally responsible manner.” Just yesterday, he called on the Obama administration to lift new restrictions on drilling in the gulf, even in face of the ever-growing economic and environmental disaster that he had a direct role in allowing to happen.

The Bush-Cheney administration made an unprecedented effort from beginning to end to rewrite our nation’s laws and rules to benefit their allies in the oil industry. They installed incompetent or corrupt cronies in important regulatory and oversight positions. And what they could not achieve legally, the administration pursued by other means.

Eight years of Bush and Cheney created an insidious, pervasive rot throughout the government—a rot so severe that it prevented the government from carrying out its most basic functions and, as we have now seen, could not be easily undone by a new administration. The pro-oil, anti-regulatory culture, agenda, and ideology relentlessly advanced by Cheney and others in the Bush administration unquestionably led to the catastrophe that now threatens to destroy the environment and economy of America’s Gulf Coast—Cheney’s Katrina.

Joshua Dorner is the Communications Director for Progressive Media at the Center for American Progress.

28 May

The curse of Bush

Posted by James O'Rourke in Policy, Politics, and Politicians. Tagged: , , , , .

washingtonpost.com

By Kate Sheppard

The Obama administration has faced harsh criticism for its oversight of offshore oil and gas development in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The most absurd commentary, of course, comes from Republicans who have consistently pushed back against any attempts to regulate industry for years. The administration has been fighting back, but no one wants to actually call the problem by its name: the Bush administration.

At a House hearing Wednesday, Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) accused Salazar of “harping on what MMS did or didn’t do in the previous administration. “Why aren’t we talking about the here and now?” asked Lamborn.

Salazar shot back about the efforts they’ve taken to reform the beleaguered agency. “Unlike the prior administration, this is not the candy store for the oil and gas kingdom that you and others were a part of,” he deadpanned. At another point in the hearing, he pointed out, again without naming names, that an official at the department was sent to federal prison for obstruction of justice under the previous administration. (That would be Steven Griles, a deputy secretary at the department from 2001 to 2004).

On Thursday, when MMS head Elizabeth Birnbaum was pushed out of her post as head of the Minerals Management Service, her statement pointed back to the Bush administration, again without naming it directly, for leaving the MMS a deeply dysfunctional institution when she took over last July. She said that she hopes the reforms that Salazar has proposed for the agency “will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited.”

Continue reading »

23 Dec

The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , .

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment. Posted December 22, 2009.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which will continue to follow us until citizens stand up to fix them.

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade.

If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless ‘Oligarchs’ in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class.

At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established ‘think tanks’ like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq.

Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of ‘our’ (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn’t about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as ‘analysts’ or ‘economists’ or ‘journalists’). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy. Continue reading »

1 Dec

Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

Posted by James O'Rourke in Policy, Politics, and Politicians. Tagged: , , , , .

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

krugman_paul.jpg

“If you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes.”

Paul Krugman on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in ABC’s ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos’

tom-mostlytrue.gif

With President Barack Obama scheduled to make a speech on Dec. 1 on how the United States will proceed with the war in Afghanistan, war spending was the topic du jour on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Democratic officials have even talked of a war surtax to pay for the expense of additional troops.

Depending on how many more troops Obama decides to send, the cost could top $30 billion.

“This is a lot of money,” liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Nov. 29, 2009. “And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes.”

As the talk about the price tag for the war in Afghanistan heats up, we thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at Krugman’s claim about Bush being the first to cut taxes after leading the country into war, and to add some context.

Generally, we found, taxes and wars have followed a fairly predictable pattern: Taxes rise during wartime and then come back down in the years afterward.

We’ll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.

During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.

The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.

It’s worth noting, however, that during all of those wars, the war expenses were much larger than today, relative to the size of the economy.

Congress hasn’t formally declared war since then, but we think it’s fair to consider the wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. However, we have decided not to include the armed conflicts in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 due to their much smaller cost, length and scope.

So those are the wars. But what about major tax cuts? That’s a smaller and somewhat more subjective list.

Some of the most notable tax cuts have come during peacetime, such as the Reagan tax cut that took effect over the years 1982-84, and the smaller capital gains tax cuts under Carter and Clinton.

The one notable exception is the Kennedy tax cuts, which took effect in 1964. The conflict in Vietnam stretched from 1959 to 1975, but when the Kennedy tax cuts were implemented, the Vietnam War did not have much of an impact on the U.S. budget. Within 18 months, when the tax cuts were in full bloom, the United States was spending plenty in Vietnam.

The tax rates were phasing down just as our commitment in Vietnam was ramping up, said William Ahern of the Tax Foundation. “That would maybe be a counter example (to Krugman),” he said.

But many argue the Kennedy tax cuts shouldn’t count in Krugman’s example because they came at a time when the United States did not anticipate the escalation of the war that followed. Continue reading »

27 Jul

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Alternet.org

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 27, 2009.

We can’t just “move forward.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”

Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not. Continue reading »

20 Jul

Could Dick Cheney Go to Prison?

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

AlterNet

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News. Posted July 18, 2009.

Cheney seems to fear that if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time.

So far, the summer has been mild in the Washington area. But for former Vice President Dick Cheney, the temperature is well over 100 degrees. He is sweating profusely, and it is becoming increasingly clear why.

Cheney has broken openly with former President George W. Bush on one issue of transcendent importance — to Cheney. For whatever reason, Bush decided not to hand out blanket pardons before they both rode off into the sunset.

Cheney has complained bitterly that his former chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby should have been pardoned, rather than simply having his jail sentence commuted.

Cheney told the media that Bush left Libby “sort of hanging in the wind” by refusing to issue a pardon before leaving office. Libby had been convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak of a former CIA operations officer’s identity.

“I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that,” Cheney said. He would disclose no details of his efforts to lobby Bush on Libby’s behalf, saying they would be “best left to history.”

It is getting close to history time. You do not need to be a crackerjack analyst to understand that Cheney is feeling betrayed — that he is thinking not of Libby, but of himself, and fearing that, if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time.

His situation has grown pathetic. Aside from the man himself, it has fallen almost solely to faithful daughter, Liz, to defend her dad and to start a political backfire to keep him out of prison. She is to be admired for her faithfulness. In the process, though, she has unwittingly given much away.

Liz Cheney on the Offensive

On Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio program Monday, Liz Cheney acted again as designated hitter, responding to the recent New York Times report that her father had given “direct orders” to the CIA to withhold “information about a secret counterterrorism program for eight years.”

Not for the first time, Liz Cheney disclosed what has her father so worried and agitated. She said he is “very angry” over recent press reports that Attorney General Eric Holder may be about to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices.”

She branded this “shameful” — worse still, “un-American.” Not the interrogation practices, mind you, but the notion that her father should be held to account for them.

Typically, she did well in sticking closely to her talking points, arguing that the issue is “somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration.”

As if unprecedented decisions to torture, in violation of international law and the War Crimes Act of 1996, can be accurately described as “policies” over which there can be honest disagreement. This is about crimes, not “policies.”

Pulling out all the stops, Liz Cheney worried aloud about what this does to “morale at the CIA,” where the practitioners of what Bush called “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation believed they were acting with the blessing of the Justice Department. (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity addressed that bromide frontally on April 29, 2009, in a memorandum to our new president.)

Liz Cheney went on to argue that this could, in the future, inhibit CIA functionaries from various actions out of fear of criminal liability. (To me, that sounds like a distinct plus.)

The Decider

What has pretty much escaped notice in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is that the former vice president has also reminded us all that President Bush was the “decider.“

That unusual word sounded quite macho as Bush strutted about reminding us often that he was also commander in chief. But now, it could be the kiss of death — for Bush, as well as for Dick Cheney. Continue reading »

24 May

Obama’s ‘None Of the Above’ Terror Policy

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , .

By Ruth Marcus

Sunday, May 24, 2009

President Obama is:

(a) A disappointing sellout to conservatives, someone who ran promising to reverse the Bush administration’s excesses in the war on terrorism and has now embraced them.

(b) A dangerous liberal whose naive views about playing nicely with terrorists threaten national security.

(c) A kinder, gentler George W. Bush, hewing largely to the previous administration’s terrorism policies while wrapping them in more pleasing rhetoric.

The president has been accused of all three in the past few days, which suggests that the correct answer is:

(d) None of the above. Obama inherited a minefield of difficult legal issues entwined in the war on terrorism, and he has picked his way carefully, intelligently and — for the most part — correctly through them.

Indeed, the president’s stumbles have been more in the execution than in policy. He risked (and lost) a congressional vote on funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison before laying the necessary groundwork. He resisted (but only after seeming to open the door to) forming an independent commission to examine interrogation policies; this could have avoided the current distracting drip-drip-drip of information about who knew what when about waterboarding and whether it worked. He was for releasing the photos of detainee abuse before he was against it.

On the merits, though, Obama has mostly called it right. My disagreements concern, in the scheme of things, relatively minor issues — the reaffirmation of a broad state secrets privilege and the about-face on releasing the photos — and these are judgment calls the president made on the basis of more information, by definition, than the rest of us have.

Some of the issues that Obama dealt with in his thoughtful speech on Thursday — how to handle closing Guantanamo, whether to release memos or photographs of abuse — were messes left for him by the Bush administration. For example, Guantanamo would have been a perfect place to hold detainees and avoid the current outbreak of not-in-my-backyardism were it not for the fact that the Bush administration chose the base not for its remoteness but for its — or so it thought — lawlessness. Continue reading »

22 Mar

McConnell’s fuzzy math doesn’t compute

Posted by James O'Rourke in Obama Administration. Tagged: , , , , .

Politifact.com

By Alexander Lane
Published on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 5:28 p.m.

Related rulings:

tom-false.gif

“In just one month, the Democrats have spent more than President Bush spent in seven years on the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina combined.”

Mitch McConnell, Friday, February 27th, 2009.

Ruling: False | Details

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says it took only one month for the Democrats to exceed three of President Bush’s big-ticket items in spending.

It was red meat for the crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, where the Kentucky Republican spoke on Feb. 27. But cut into it and it starts to look overcooked.

McConnell recalled that Democrats had relentlessly criticized Bush’s spending. “But now the shoe is on the other foot. And what have we seen?” he said. “Well, in just one month — just one month, the Democrats have spent more than President Bush spent in seven years on the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina combined — in one month.”

This is quickly becoming a Republican talking point. Rep. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, used the same line in a statement on March. 4. But we crunched the numbers and gave McConnell a False .

6 Mar

More Broad Brush Issues

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , .

ROBERT B. REICH

Obama Responsible for Wall Street’s Meltdown? Where Populist Rage is Heading

robertreich.blogspot.com — The argument that Obama is somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street is absurd. Every major policy that led to this collapse occurred under George W’s (failure to) watch. This bizarre charge wouldn’t be worth mentioning were it not a market test for a more intense attack from Wall Street and Republican media outlets next year as the nation moves into the gravitational range of the 2010 midterm elections.

MARINA LITVINSKY

How Wall Street Paid For Its Own Funeral

ipsnews.net — A new report says that Wall Street has only itself to blame for the misguided deregulation that led to the current deepening financial crisis.

ROBERT SCHEER

AIG: Billions Dished Out in the Dark

thenation.com — Forget the bleating of Rush Limbaugh; the problem is not with the stimulus package. The problem is with what is not being debated: the far more expensive Wall Street bailout that is being pushed through — as in the case of the latest AIG rescue — in secret, hurried deal-making primarily by the unelected secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

HAROLD MYERSON

It’s Renovation, Not Socialism

washingtonpost.com — Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves. The deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

JOEL BLIEFUSS

The Audacity of Reform

inthesetimes.com — How much stronger might our economy be today if legislators hadn’t counted on the financial sector to bankroll their campaigns?

ELIOT SPITZER

Loan Ranger

slate.com — The way Americans pay for college is a mess. Here’s how to fix it.

ROBERT PARRY

How Close the Bush Bullet

consortiumnews.com — Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Tortured Memos

nytimes.com — We were horrified to be reminded that the nation still has not plumbed the depths of the Bush administration’s abuses. At the same time, it was a relief to see President Obama beginning to make good on his promise of greater transparency.

29 Jan

The Return To Bushonomics

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , .

thinkprogress.org

ECONOMY

The Return To Bushonomics

Yesterday, in a 244-to-188 vote, the House approved an $819 billion economic recovery plan written by House Democrats and supported by President Obama. Despite Obama’s aggressive outreach efforts, the entire Republican caucus, along with 11 Democrats, voted against the plan. Afraid of crossing Obama’s high approval ratings, conservatives are claiming that they are enthusiastic to work with him. “We’ve made it clear that we will continue to work with the president to develop a plan that will work,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who led his caucus in opposition to Obama’s plan. “We just don’t think it’s going to work.” Instead, Boehner and his colleagues pushed for a return to Bushonomics. “We have said let’s do tax cuts, let’s let the American people make the decisions on how they’ll spend the money,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), on CNBC earlier this week.”That will stimulate the economy more than bringing all that money to Washington and then distributing it out in all sorts of government programs.” The alternative proposed by House Republicans yesterday, which was defeated 266-170, was composed almost entirely of tax cuts. “These are the same people who told us the Bush tax cuts were going to lead to nirvana,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in response to the conservative focus on tax cuts. On MSNBC yesterday, one of the most prominent proponents of the tax-cut-only approach, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), complained that the Democrats’ recovery plan would take “America in a new direction.” Though conservatives might be happy to be free from the “burden” of President Bush, they still seem to be longing for his failed economic policies.



SAME OLD ARGUMENTS: In 2001 and 2003, Bush pushed massive tax cuts through Congress, claiming that they were “vital” to boosting the economy and creating jobs. Though Bush initially sold his 2001 tax cut by insisting “that the federal government was running an excessive budget surplus,” he quickly changed his argument as the economy worsened, claiming they would be “a form of demand-side economic stimulus.” “The economy has slowed down, in which case we need to accelerate tax cuts,” Bush said in a March 2001 radio address. “You see, tax relief will put money in people’s pockets, which will help give the economy a second wind.” “By ensuring that Americans have more to spend, to save and to invest, this legislation is adding fuel to an economic recovery,” announced Bush in 2003, as he signed his tax cut legislation. “We have taken aggressive action to strengthen the foundation of our economy so that every American who wants to work will be able to find a job.” 



BUSH’S TAX CUTS DIDN’T WORK: Before he left office this past month, Bush told he U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that “when people take a look back at this moment in our economic history, they’ll recognize tax cuts work.” But the fact is that they didn’t. As Center for American Progress Senior Fellows Christian Weller and John Halpin noted in 2006, the outcome of the 2001 tax cuts was “the weakest employment growth in decades.” The 2003 tax cuts didn’t fare much better, resulting in job creation that was “well below historical averages.” When Bush’s White House proposed the 2003 cuts, they promised that it would add 5.5 million new jobs between June 2003 and the end of 2004. But “by the end of 2004, there were only 2.6 million more jobs than in June 2003.” As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the belief that Bush’s tax cuts successfully stimulated the economy is a form of mythology. CAP’s Michael Ettlinger and John Irons wrote in September, “Economic growth as measured by real U.S. gross domestic product was stronger following the tax increases of 1993 than in the two supply-side eras” that followed Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts and Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. Indeed, employment growth was much stronger post-1993 than post-2001. The average annual employment growth was 2.5 percent after 1993 and just 0.6 percent after 2001. Unfortunately, the supply-side myth that tax cuts cure all still lives on today, as conservatives complain about progressive approaches to fixing the mess left by Bush.



TAX CUTS ARE INEFFECTIVE STIMULUS: The underlying folly of the conservative push for an all-tax cuts approach is the simple fact that tax cuts are ineffective stimulus. Mark Zandi, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign and the chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, has argued for months that the “fiscal bang for the buck” of tax cuts is significantly inferior to spending increases. According to Zandi’s research, a corporate tax cut delivers $0.30 in real GDP growth for every $1 invested. In comparison, infrastructure spending delivers $1.59 in GDP for every $1 spent. Zandi isn’t alone in this belief: the Congressional Budget Office “deemed last year that corporate tax cuts are ‘not a particularly cost-effective method of stimulating business spending.’” Despite these economic facts, conservatives like Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) continue promoting corporate tax cuts as the solution. “If we could lower the corporate tax rate, that would be one of the best things that we could do to make American business more competitive in the world and actually help stimulate the economy,” Ensign claimed this week.

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