Expanding executive power — mellifluously

Noam Chomsky:

Q: On Obama’s 2012 election campaign web site, it clearly states that Obama has prosecuted six whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. Does he think he’s appealing to some constituency with that affirmation?

A: I don’t know what base he’s appealing to. If he thinks he’s appealing to the nationalist base, well, they’re not going to vote for him anyway. That’s why I don’t understand it. I don’t think he’s doing anything besides alienating his own natural base. So it’s something else.

What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there’s a little difference in his tone. It’s not as crude and brutal as they were, but it’s pretty hard to see much of a difference.

It also extends to other developments, most of which we don’t really know about, like the surveillance state that’s being built and the capacity to pick up electronic communication. It’s an enormous attack on personal space and privacy. There’s essentially nothing left. And that will get worse with the new drone technologies that are being developed and given to local police forces.

As for Citizens United, Chomsky may think it’s a “rotten” decision but “it does have some justifications” if you’re a free speech libertarian.

A certain level of violence so inherent that it’s shielded by the Constitution

Charles Pierce on why the gun control bill failed:

I wish I believed it was just all about money. Then Gabrielle Giffords, Michael Bloomberg and the other millionnaires lining up on the other side would have a fighting chance. I wish I believed that it was just all about power, and the threat of losing elections, because then the money now lining up on the other side could even the odds. But I don’t believe it is. There is a strong, coherent bloc in this building that believes that a certain level of violence is so inherent in this country that it is shielded absolutely by the Constitution, and that it is so essential to who we are as a people that to try to control it — let alone eliminate it — weakens our national institutions and blights our national character. There is nothing Machiavellian about this. It is what people believe is part of what makes America what it is. It is an essential article of faith. It is unshakable. It is implacable. And it is triumphant.

The hard work continues…

I hate to quote the Daily Kos but:

Okay, so the White House is now facing imminent defeat in the Democratically controlled Senate on legislation the president has staked a huge amount of his political capital. This is the first time I’ve seen a 90 percent approval issue fail. Combine that with no movement on important judicial and executive branch nominations. So far we’ve seen a stupid $1 trillion dollar discretionary spending cut we were told was never going to happen, happen. And of course we’ve witnessed the political mess of the White House winning the worst kind of friends by attacking Social Security and making enemies of damn near everyone else. We’re seeing stagnant workforce numbers, with still record numbers leaving the labor force, even more with some of the crappiest jobs imaginable, and even more stuck in the mud with few upside prospects. Not to mention austerity economics coming from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. And as a result, the president’s popularity is falling underwater and people still feel the country is careening.

If there’s at least one possible glimmer of win on the horizon, perhaps it is on immigration reform, but I’m not hopeful. The House is already talking about breaking up the bill. Considering this White House will always fight for any sort of line they can sign no matter how miniscule, I suspect by the time we get to the end of that process we will have possibly some watered down Dream Act and some extra money for border drones. That’s bout it. (h/t Digby)

Look, I had no hope this would pass, but that it came this close with an overwhelming majority of Americans supporting it means that the hard, awful, boring work of grassroots organizing must go on. They gotta keep at it. I agree with Michael Bloomberg of all people that the NRA’s power is vastly overrated yet the perception that the NRA is the NKVD frightens legislators. There will be a change.

Watch out, lawbreakers

“Amnesty” eh.

Though bashed as “amnesty” by hardliners, the congressional plans to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants treat them like law breakers who need to watch their step for more than a dozen years.

They’ll have to pay fines, get fingerprinted, show they’re crime-free taxpayers and — little reported until now — check in periodically with a probation-like immigration system to make sure they’re in good standing with the law, according to Democrats and Republicans familiar with the Senate’s proposed legislation, which will be released Tuesday.

Those who miss a scheduled payment of their fines, upwards of $2,000, could lose the right to stay in the United States.

The earliest that most of the currently undocumented immigrants could become citizens: 13 years from the date of passage of the act.

That timeline becomes longer if the federal government doesn’t meet timelines to make good on creating a new visa-tracking system, ensuring employers don’t knowingly hire the undocumented and securing the border — at a cost of at least $5 billion, according to one version of the Senate bill.

I suppose “amnesty” means “not returning eleven million illegal immigrants by force of bayonet.”

Go ahead and try

I wasn’t surprised by the announcement yesterday that Barack Obama endorsed cuts to Social Security in the form of fiddling with a grotesquely named fiscal legerdemain called “chained CPI.” It didn’t surprise me because Barack Obama has governed like a boy who bought “I Like Ike” posters at thrift stores and because Democrats are stupid. Should House and Senate Democrats allow the president to get away with this flimflam, they will pay for it in 2014, a vengeance that will be exacted by moderate and conservative Democrats, not by liberals. As Digby notes:

A primary challenger doesn’t have to be an “ultra-lib” (whatever that is) to run against a Democrat who voted against Social Security. They could be a moderate or conservative, especially if there is a large elderly or veteran population. And it certainly doesn’t have to be in a swing district where a Republican might win the General. In fact, this will most likely happen in liberal districts if a progressive Democrat is foolish enough to vote with the president instead of her constituents. That’s where the activists have the most clout.

Of course, it won’t be confined to liberal districts because Social Security and medicare are so popular that even someone who is running from the right can use it to beat up a Democrat. I could see it happening in any Democratic district in the country. And certainly any Republican challenger will have no compunction about doing it: their only growing demographic is the elderly.

It has become a habit for newscasters to accept balderdash about Social Security from troglodytes. No one questions them. But don’t take my word for it. Let their suntanned demigod explain, in an obviously unscripited moment of exasperation:

The dogs of war

Horrendous:

Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

In 2013 I still fight with supporters of the worst foreign policy disaster since JFK committed “advisers” to Saigon. But the weasels have learned. Bush didn’t lie, they reason — even those faggoty French believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction! Besides, the war wasn’t illegal — Congress voted to authorize it. Opponents start with the wrong answer. Instead of relying on “Bush lied,” respond: “Why the hurry? Why were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice and their assistants and undersecretaries already on record before Bush’s installation about the imminence of an Iraqi threat?” Remember the babble about nuclear silos with rockets aimed at Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle or something? This public statement was already public record. Glance at the names — scions, satraps, and luminaries of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. The damned still live, paroled on Sunday morning talk shows on the networks and cable TV stations and on editorial pages nationwide.

But the outcome defied my imagination. It wasn’t possible that the Bush administration, having begun a war, would now let the country descend into anarchy for three and a half years — until the much-hyped surge. Ah, the surge. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment supported it, anointed one David Petraeus to lead it. Well, look what The Guardian published today:

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

So now the general and former CIA chief, who resigned under the most venal circumstances, empowered a man who, we learn from reading his CV, advised the Salvadorean miliarty from 1984 to 1986 to shift the “the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more ‘discriminate’ approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on ‘human intelligence’ and interrogation. As Charles Pierce noted today, “There is no absolution available to any of the people who helped the country down into this epic political and military disaster no matter how lachrymose their apologies or how slick their arguments.”

Friends and enemies

Digby:

There has been intense speculation as to why the administration has taken these steps, from prosaic political motivations going into the election to genuine belief on the part of the administration that fewer gun prosecutions, more deportations and a marijuana crackdown are the right policies. (Some people have suggested this is is because of fear of the federal police bureaucracy which pretty much does its own thing regardless of the president, which may be the scariest possibility of all.) It’s hard to know exactly what has made the administration take these positions because they are rarely asked about it. The campaign ignored it because the Republicans approach to all this is so much worse…

…And I have to point out that the one group of people one would expect to reward the president for these stances — the right wing — is the one group that hates him with a blinding passion and will never even give him credit for waking up in the morning. Perhaps moderates might be impressed, but I doubt they even know about it. (These aren’t issues that animate them.) At the very least the left has a bad taste in its mouth — at worst they are actively hostile. So, who is pleased with these actions? Who exactly is the government serving?

To add to this delicious grocery list, the Obama administration aims drone rockets at American citizens abroad accused of terrorism, just like Bill Clinton signed a punitive welfare reform bill and the Telecommunications Act. Only now is Clinton not reflexively dismissed as a rapist and husband of the woman who murdered Vince Foster. Canonization will come to Barack Obama in his lifetime.

N’est plus ça change

About that leaked white paper authorizing drone strikes on American citizens. Actions have consequences:

…This document helpfully underscored the critical point that is otherwise difficult to convey: when you endorse the application of a radical state power because the specific target happens to be someone you dislike and think deserves it, you’re necessarily institutionalizing that power in general. That’s why political leaders, when they want to seize extremist powers or abridge core liberties, always choose in the first instance to target the most marginalized figures: because they know many people will acquiesce not because they support that power in theory but because they hate the person targeted. But if you cheer when that power is first invoked based on that mentality – I’m glad Obama assassinated Awlaki without charges because he was a Bad Man! – then you lose the ability to object when the power is used in the future in ways you dislike (or by leaders you distrust), because you’ve let it become institutionalize.

But it has become institutionalized, so hectoring Americans into caring for a concept as negotiable as citizenship is a waste of time. For one, most Americans consider an al-Awlaki a creature who abjured his citizenship the moment he was accused of posting nasty YouTube clips. Then there is the nauseating fact that in the era of self-deportation, the Dream Act, Governor Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Hawaiian birth certificates, and “getting in the back of the line,” citizenship alchemizes from concept to fungible conceit — swallowed, rejected, or denied depending on the circumstances. Blizzards in the Northeast adduce a conspiracy orchestrated by a well-connected and -financed cabal of scientists disseminating a climate change fiction.

In short, Americans have accepted the Bush and Obama administration’s expansions of battlefields, have accepted that we fight a New Kind of War; the War on Drugs, Cancer, and Gingivitis were dress rehearsals.

Mirror moves

The lead item in yesterday’s ABC News broadcast. Today’s New York Times editorial. Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night. Adam Serwer and The New Yorker, and the oft-hysterical Obamaphile Andrew Sullivan today (an Oxford man wrote the following one-sentence final paragraph: “Come back, Mr Obama. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you”). Chris Hayes will likely follow. These organizations and pundits comprise the squishy middle or the hard left. Not a one issued assuaging words about the Obama administration’s drone policy. I mention this only because I cannot think of a single moment during the Bush administration when its conservative base opposed a foreign policy decision.

Reflections on rhetoric

I hope Charles Pierce is right about the nostrums in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address; I want to believe that pointed references to government-as-Leviathan were “only a little deke to get Brokaw looking the other way.” I know I didn’t imagine the president calling upon the force and fire of rhetoric that stoked a lot more people in 2008 than I to animate the best passage:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword (Ed. Note: Lincolnosity!), we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together. Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune … we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

As sinuous a connecting of dots as anything I’ve seen since FDR’s own second inaugural speech in 1937, in which he pissed off a lot of people for not smiling his beautiful teeth at Alf Landon supporters. A click on the tag will unearth writing going back to 2007 where I’ve doubted the buoyancy of rhetoric, especially when spoken by as intelligent a man as Obama. I’ve had to fight my instinctual attraction to the man, in large part because journalists are not honest about the ways in which ritual and ceremony mitigate policy disappointments.

But on grand occasions like inaugurations words matter. Giving climate change — a development that will cause more damage than the “leaving debt to our children” canard — Knitting Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall together on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day matters. So does an acknowledgment that the last thirty years of the neoliberal and conservative marriage — ratified by Obama and his sainted predecessor Bill Clinton, up on that dais with his wife — have done grievous damage to what remains of the middle class. I doubt Jack Lew will change these policies in the Treasury Department; I scoff at the notion that John Kerry and Chuck Hagel will reevaluate drone policy. But if the progressive base finagled to get those words mentioned in Obama’s second inaugural address, then I must assume it has the clout to scare him into living up to those words. Let us never stop. Let us never let our guard down.

What now?

Digby:

A lot of people like to say that government is run purely for the rich. But that’s not entirely true. It’s not true in many European nations where austerity is being enacted, anyway. And most of the rich don’t actually benefit from a double-dip recession.

What seems more likely is that the current economic, ecological and political system is broken and unsustainable. Globalization creates downward pressure on labor, which pushes wealth upward and depresses wages, which forces policymakers to incentivize asset growth over wage growth while decreasing the cost of goods and increasing consumer debt. That in turn becomes impractical and creates wobbly, crash-prone economies even as middle-classes disappear. Birth rates decline due to lack of economic opportunity and insanely long periods of educational indenture for young people, which causes developed economies to turn to immigration for demographic balance, which in turn causes social unrest. Nation-states are powerless to stop multinational corporations from blackmailing them over “jobs” and buying their governments, and struggle to find coherent ways to deal non-state-actor crises such as international terrorism and climate change. Meanwhile, ecological and crises are abundant, guaranteeing a slowing of economic growth absent some significant paradigm shift.

No, I don’t know how to find an alternative or what the alternative would look like.

Of cliffs and slopes

Naturally no paper will carry this story:

On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K — the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from ’99 to ’00 — the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes “over the fiscal cliff.” (The difference between Y2K and the fiscal cliff being that computer programmers worked around the clock to ensure the former was a non-event.)

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months — and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won’t even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

Cliff, baby, cliff!