Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Terror Works:
A victory for all the unborn children. – Scott Roeder, murderer of George Tiller, commenting on the permanent closing of Tiller’s clinic. That leaves only two other clinics in the country who perform late term abortions. And, there have been multiple reports that anti-abortion protestors have taken on a renewed ‘aggressiveness’, shouting at workers, ‘You’re the next to die.’
Europe Turns Right: Could it Happen Here? Currently the Conservatives are laughable- disorganized, oppositional and without program- and outclassed and outmaneuvered by Obama. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that much of the country is easily (mis)-led and is under-informed (to put it mildly), so a comeback is far from impossible. Obama has thrown his lot in with Wall Street, and if, as many predict, the economy doesn’t revive but rather sags (or worse) in the coming year, and health care is either not passed or done without a public option (alienating the Left) the Republicans could capture the populist anger.
Michael Lind’s essay reminds that the Right won in recent elections in Europe, largely because of nationalism, populism and the recession. In those elections to the European Parliament, center-left social democrats lost almost ¼ of their seats while far-right nationalist and populist candidates made large gains. He posits: it could happen here.
Should the Democratic Party be concerned? The situation in the U.S. is different from that in Europe in many ways. The tensions over large-scale Latino immigration to the U.S. are minor compared with those over large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe. Libertarianism is far stronger in the U.S. than in Europe, so that right-wing protest is as likely to be channeled through libertarians like Ron Paul as through nativists like Patrick Buchanan. And Barack Obama frequently appears in public standing in front of not one but several gigantic American flags.
Still, I think Democratic strategists should be worried about the European election results. The Obama administration has inherited its third-way neoliberalism from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Notwithstanding Obama's personal popularity, a synthesis of internationalist idealism and deference to Wall Street is not a sustainable formula for governing during the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. Nor was the same synthesis popular among American voters back in the Clinton era, when Clinton was only narrowly reelected while the Democrats lost Congress from 1994 to 2006. When the Democrats regained Congress in 2006, it was thanks in large part to the success of populists like Heath Shuler and Jim Webb, who ran left on economics and right on immigration.
The Republicans have been very shrewd in voting not only against the too-small stimulus but also against the Obama administration's expensive and ill-conceived bailout of America's zombie banks. If Larry Summers and Tim Geithner succeed in identifying the Democrats too closely with Wall Street, then the moribund Republicans might be revitalized as a vehicle for anti-establishment populism -- not Hitlerian, but Jacksonian. A Republican comeback might be helped further if Democrats seek to increase immigration at a time of mass unemployment.
If the European elections really do signal a trend, then both the right and left in the U.S. will have to consider what "Europe" symbolizes. Conservatives may have to reconsider their Europhobia and liberals their Europhilia, if "European" politics is identified with economic nationalism and immigration restriction rather than with supra-national institutions and post-national idealism. (Will American conservatives approvingly rename French fries "Patriot fries"?) And in a world where voters even in "enlightened" Europe reject the post-nationalist left, American progressives may reconsider their flirtation with an idealized social democratic EU and try to connect with older American center-left traditions in which liberalism, populism and national sovereignty were thought to be not only compatible but mutually reinforcing. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/09/populist_backlash/print.html
Photo Suppression: Victory, for now. Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman continue to push their Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, trying to capitalize on the usual FEAR, abetted by spineless Democrats. The duo threaten to shut down the Senate, if not the Government, if the measure is not passed.
Much of the Congress and public have been deluded, thinking our judicial system and jails can’t handle Guantanamo prisoners, many of which, of course, are innocent. Yet, we already hold convicted “terrorists” and other hardened criminals in the supermax prison in Colorado.
Glenn Greenwald:
Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory for those who believe in open government and transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition to that amendment among progressive House Democrats was jeopardizing passage of the spending bill. Readers here and those of various blogs who bombarded House members with opposition calls on Friday obviously played an important role in forcing the withdrawal of this pernicious amendment. Successes of this sort are rare enough that -- even if fleeting -- they warrant some celebration. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
First Detainee Arrives in U.S. …awaiting trial
The Obama administration pressed ahead yesterday with its plans to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, flying a detainee to New York to face federal trial despite bipartisan opposition in Congress to bringing such prisoners to the United States for trial, resettlement or continued detention.
The transfer of Ahmed Ghailani to face capital charges in the 1998 East Africa bombings marked the first time a detainee who is not an American citizen has been brought from the prison in Cuba to the United States. Ghailani, appearing briefly in U.S. District Court in Manhattan yesterday, pleaded not guilty to multiple charges in connection with the blasts at the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Those attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
Human rights groups, which earlier expressed dismay about President Obama's announcement that some suspects would be tried in reformed military commissions, welcomed Ghailani's transfer. But Republicans and some military groups, who were cheered by the prospect of renewed military tribunals, sharply attacked the decision to hold any trials in the United States. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/09/AR2009060900401_pf.html
Lebanon: Democracy at Work; Obama a Factor? Many explanations have been offered, but it’s quite possible that Obama’s Thursday speech may have tipped the results in Lebanon toward the pro-U.S. coalition. Hezbollah members have been quoted, amongst similar sentiments-- ‘it is no longer safe to use the anti-American card.’
The secretary-general of Hezbollah, a Shia political party, has accepted that his opposition alliance has lost a parliamentary election in Lebanon to the ruling March 14 coalition.
Hassan Nasrallah made the acknowledgment on Monday, hours after official results of the popular poll were released.
"We accept the official results in a sporting spirit," he said in a televised address.
"I would like to congratulate all those who won, those in the majority and those in the opposition," he said.
Official results showed the Sunni-led March 14 coalition, led by Saad Hariri, the son of Rafiq Hariri, the assassinated former prime minister, winning 71 seats in the 128-seat parliament, while the Hezbollah-led alliance took 57. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/2009681835910848.html
Obama ‘Saved’ the Banks (for now)… without a Plan Married to Wall Street, the least venturesome/creative/helpful of his policies. Stable now, denouement to come?
Derek Thompson:
Half a year ago, our financial system was in catastrophe, and the debate was over how much money it would take to bail them out, or even take them over. Today, the biggest banks are -- or at least appear to be -- on stable footing, and the debate is over how much TARP money they will be allowed to give back. To be clear, this is a statement of confidence from the banks, not evidence that they will be OK in four or six months. But it is still a remarkable turn of events, one we can credit to the Obama administration's overall strategy of ... what again?
Consider: Geithner's first plan was a flop. PPIP is dead, or hibernating. So what exactly saved the United States' financial system? Ezra Klein elegantly encapsulates the first rule of the bank bailout as: "heads the economy improves, tails the taxpayers bail them out." That is exactly right. But was it a bad rule? In the short term, maybe not. The Libor inter-bank lending rate is falling. Unemployment is slowing. The banks are finding it easier to raise capital. Green shoots galore. What exactly fertilized them?
Perhaps it was simply the guarantee that the United States would not let any bank fail. Not ever. Consider the incredible response to the stress tests, when the US told Bank of America it would need $34 billion to last a deeper downturn. Rather than scare investors away, BofA's results allowed them to raise that capital in about month. The stress tests essentially said to investors: Raise this money and the United States will continue to be there, always. Too big to fail is an indictment of our banking system, but it was also used as the animating philosophy of US banking policy. Hasn't it kind of worked?
Of course the answer is yes and no. From the perspective of Tuesday, June 9, 2009, the federal government's strategy to hold the banks' hands and say everything will be all right seems to have stabilized Wall Street. The good news is that we're on our way back to square one. The bad news is that...wait, we're on our way back to square one! What happened to the much needed reforms that would be forged in the cauldron of the crisis? http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/06/how_we_saved_the_banks_without_a_bank_plan.php
Insurers / Big Pharma vs Public Option: Now’s the time! Robert Reich:
So they're pulling out all the stops - pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.
Max Baucus, Chair of Senate Finance (now exactly why does the Senate Finance Committee have so much say over health care?) hasn't shown his cards but staffers tell me he's more than happy to sign on to any one of these. But Baucus is waiting for more support from his colleagues, and none of the three proposals has emerged as the leading candidate for those who want to kill the public option without showing they're killing it. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and his staff are still pushing for a full public option, but with Kennedy ailing, he might not be able to round up the votes. (Kennedy's health committee released a draft of a bill today, which contains the full public option.)
…The concrete is being mixed and about to be poured. And after it's poured and hardens, universal health care will be with us for years to come in whatever form it now takes. Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers - one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies, and pushes insurers to do what they've promised to do. Don't wait until the concrete hardens and we've lost this battle. http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/public-option-smokescreens-and-what-you.html
-R
