The Authoritarian Mindset

Did you know that the President has authorized the killing of an American citizen based on secret evidence without any judicial oversight? How could this possibly be legally justified?

In the fullest administration statement to date, Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense. By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.

That is to say, wherever there sits a suspected terrorist (suspected based on secret evidence, remember), there is a war zone. In these sorts of places we send unmanned drones, drones that have killed about 14 terrorists for every 687 civilians. Given that we tend to trumpet this whole rule of law thing (ya’know, pillar of our government and all) we ought to probably ask how it is we know this terrorist is a terrorist if he hasn’t been convicted of any terrorism related charges. But that would be a silly question, al-Awlaki is a terrorist because the President says so. That’s the authoritarian mindset. At least somebody is mad about that:

But I’ll be god damned if I’m going to pretend it is ok to start ordering the assassination of American citizens, even if it is done “legally” and ordered by politicians I generally like. This really is not a tough call at all. This is not because I am some crazy civil liberties absolutist. This is just basic common sense, and this kind of thing would set an absolutely horrible precedent. It is beyond me how anyone could get upset about Gitmo and Abu Gharaib and then think assassination of citizens is ok. Personally, I’ll take terrorized by guard dogs and waterboarded over a bullet to the brain pan.

Kagan: The Quiet Careerist

Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan represents one of the worst features of liberal academia, the conscious effort to approach profound injustice with dispassionate objectivity. Scholars who either refuse, or are incapable of, expressing genuine moral outrage towards the more nefarious aspects of our political establishment (like illegal NSA wiretapping and the ever-expanding, constitution-shredding executive branch) give the illusion of normalcy to what is in fact a radical departure from legal tradition. Elena Kagan, this shielded scholar, ought to have made her viewpoint clear and vociferously attacked the executive abuses of the past eight years, but she was almost entirely silent on all the important legal issues of the day.

It has become clear that Kagan is far more concerned with her career objectives than the world of ideas. Kagan—who appeared in her high school yearbook wearing judge’s robe and holding a gavel—has so carefully shielded herself that even people around her simply haven’t a clue what, if any, strong personal convictions she might have. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog described her reserved character: “extraordinarily – almost artistically – careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.” The New York Times editorial page has even asked Kagan to “open up,” for she has “spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.”

You wouldn’t marry somebody after five cold and apprehensive dates, so why would you want to select a justice based on the five narrowly technical and non-ideological scholarly papers she has written? In fact, it’s even easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get somebody off the Supreme Court! The process of selecting Supreme Court judges is very much to blame for the shielded lives that prospective judges lead. David Brooks has argued the politics of the selection process “gives a brilliant and gifted person a strong incentive to be reticent and cagey.” What a strange system we have crafted for filling this lifetime position, a system that demands we trust the President’s choice simply by virtue of it being the President’s choice. We simply need to know more, or we could, as Glenn Greenwald argues, very well end up moving the court to the right.

Some critics have found this uncertainty simply unacceptable, and the confirmation process “a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis." Critics like Elena Kagan circa fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, Kagan has vowed to renege that critique and be more reserved when she is questioned by the Senate. This is a very disturbing trend in the selection of Supreme Court justices, a trend that weakens the ability of the Senate and the public to pressure the President on this decision of profound importance. People in positions of authority undoubtedly desire to manage and manipulate information to service their ends. If we have learned anything over the past decade it is that the only way the public can protect itself from these abuses of executive authority is to demand full disclosure on matters of such importance. Others, like Larry Lessing, friend and supporter of Elena Kagan, have lauded her secrecy, “she has spent her time, not blogging, not twittering, not trying to be out there in the forefront of every single legal issue, just doing her job, and doing it extremely well.” I think we’d all be a little bit more comfortable if she had a Twitter account.

A plan-less party's pathetic panning of the President's plan.

Krugman is bewildered by the Republican critique of Obama's stimulus package and its alleged lackluster affect on the labor market:

By and large I’ve long been inured to the deliberate stupidity of much political discourse. But for some reason the vision of Republicans whining, “where are those 3.5 million jobs Obama promised” — less than four months after the stimulus bill was signed, and with hardly any funds disbursed — got to me.

Without presenting an adequate alternative, Republicans have no grounds to criticize Obama’s stimulus. Republican plans for economic resuscitation were retarded by a dogmatic commitment to an unadulterated free market -- an avenue which most certainly would have been worse on the labor market.

The perverted logic employed is akin to the entire Republican car dealer fiasco: Republican dealerships are closed down, prompting conspiracy theories that the Obama administration was insidiously attacking Republican supporters, but neglecting the fact that all the Republican car dealers would have been facing the prospect of closure if there were no auto bailouts.

You can’t stand on the sidelines watching somebody bleed to death and then criticize one who desperately attempts to stop the bleeding (be it successfully or unsuccessfully).

The Sotomayer attacks: destructive politics when Americans are in need of constructive solutions.

Republican's identity politics are becoming increasingly odious:

We have Rush Limbaugh:

She's got a -- she's an angry woman, she's got a -- she's a bigot. She's a racist.

Newt Gingrich goes the extra mile, and tweets his accusation from Auschwitz:

White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.

Pat Buchanan spews on MSNBC:

She is also an affirmative action pick, Chris.

And from Tom Tancredo:

I’m telling you she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist in any other context.

Republicans are courageous defenders of those who face discrimination--right? Yglesias sees this view as problematic:

I’ve made this point a million times, but it’s fascinating to me the kind of double standard conservatives apply to these issues. You never hear Rush Limbaugh decrying everyday racism against non-whites in the United States. You never hear him recounting an anecdote about an African-American man having trouble hailing a cab or being followed by a shopkeeper. He doesn’t do stories about how people with stereotypically “black” names suffer job discrimination. He doesn’t bemoan the fact that the United States has an aircraft carrier named after a fanatical segregationist. Which is fine. Everyone’s interested in some things and not in others. Rush isn’t interested in racism. Except that like most conservatives, he’s actually very interested in allegations of racial discrimination against white people. He sees the defense of white interests as integral to his political mission.

Shouldn't they at least attempt to disguise their xenophobia as attacks on Sotemayer's liberalism? That would certainly be an easier case to substantiate (though she appears to be rather centrist). Why the ignoble attacks? Isn't the Hispanic vote becoming increasingly important? Well, perhaps not as much as you would think:

Hispanics were not a key component in Obama's win. However, this is not to say that the Republicans should not try to contest the Hispanic vote. As the last scatterplot above shows, further losses of Hispanics would make the Democrats competitive in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. In some sense this is no big deal, at least at the presidential level: If the Democrats remain at 53% or 54% of the vote, they'll win nationally in any case. If we imagine a national swing of 3% or so toward the Republicans, so they're competitive nationally, then their big risk if they lose Hispanic votes is to no longer be viable in Florida (where we estimate McCain to have won 43% of the two-party vote among Hispanics in 2008). That's the state where Republicans really can't afford to abandon the Hispanic vote.

I figure there could still be a backlash from other immigrant groups against the Republican blitz. These unsubstantiated attacks on Sonia Sotomayer tend to be racially justified and could still be seen as xenophobic by other immigrants who would tend to identify with Hispanics socio-economically. Either way, outside the base there will certainly be some cost. This leads to a frightful but increasingly obvious conclusion: Republicans are pandering to their base with malignant bile with no concern for other groups, and/or they sincerely feel whites are being marginalized by minority voices.

Either avenue is frightening. The United States faces grave challenges and her people face genuine hardships (particularly those working class rust belt voters who inexplicably gravitate towards the Republican party). Hateful mainstream conservative discourse has done nothing in response to those challenges (no healthcare plan) and dialogue is becoming increasingly xenophobic, crowding out moderate Republican voices. The way a heavily militarized United States confronts those ignored challenges--ignored in favor of odious populist pandering--will have profound consequences for the rest of the world. Will the hapless be mobilized towards constructing a progressive plan of action or will they be mobilized towards an enemy (illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug dealers, rappers, 'activist judges', ect.) who is supposedly responsible for their plight?

The Tancredos and Limbaughs of the world have made their choice clear--a choice Noam Chomsky has encountered before:

Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do—it’s interesting—there’s a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.

Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, “What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?”

That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: “Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there.” OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting. It’s been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase “working class.” She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.

One shouldn't need to descend this far to realize that inciting populist anger can be a pernicious enterprise.

We all play identity politics, stop feigning indignation

Krugman provides a little perspective on the crude accusations that the Sonia Sotomayer pick was an act of petty identity politics:

But is this any crazier, when you come down to it, than the Cult of Bush that ruled much of Washington for years? It was positive, not negative (though there was plenty of that too), but it was similarly about identity politics — you were supposed to support Bush, not because of how he did his job, but because he was, drumroll, a regular guy

Krugman is right for pointing out the cult of personality surrounding Bush. But we can't forget that Obama-mania propped up a messiah caricature, while the President has in actuality significantly betrayed his lofty image as principled defender of civil liberties, peace, and the rule-of-law. People on the left like Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman who rightly point to Obama's contradictions with respect to the treatment of detainees and AfPak strategy can only do so given that President Obama's campaign was largely void of substance--steeped in vague proclamations of American values and propelled largely by identity politics (a dearth of specifics allows for liberals to project their ideals onto him). Don't get me wrong, the Obama presidency has been positive in many respects, but even people like myself who find a home in the left must acknowledge that the fervor created by the abstract campaign was an impressive orchestration of identity politics. Obama was even commended by the advertising industry, awarded the title of marketer of the year for his campaign. How often have you known advertisers to value substance?

That's not to say President Obama himself is shallow, or that Sonia Sotomayer was an imprudent pick (it appears that she is a rather prudent one), but lets not kid ourselves--neither party has the right to cast the identity-politics stone. Both parties will pounce on any particular decision that has the optics of political posturing rather than principled judgment. Claims of indignation ought to be disregarded entirely; identity politics is the norm, not some morally depraved aberration.

The 'Weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ' pt. 2

A couple of weeks ago I made a post regarding the increasingly pervasive influence of evangelical denominations within the US military.

If there remains any doubt of the threat these maniacal crusaders pose to the integrity and perception of the armed forces, look at Donald Rumsfeld's assault on the separation of church and state (and graphic design aesthetics).

http://gawker.com/5258524/donald-rumsfelds-judgement+happy-scary-bibilical-defense-briefing-art

A repositioning of torture

President Obama has ceased to employ the torture policy of the last administration. This rather important policy shift in ending torture policies (much like closing Guantanamo) is only symbolic when one understands the abundance of abuse that continues just a short step removed from the areas of unambiguous American responsibility. Those more ambiguous areas where torture is implicitly endorsed by the United States--undertrained Afghan jailers, extraordinary rendition, monetary support for ignoble regimes, ect--are where torture will continue. Noam Chomsky maintains that this has long been the standard:

Ordinarily, torture is farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their government-established torture chambers. Alain Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out that "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so." Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, "the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed." Obama's ban "doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of 'armed conflict,' which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict ... his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."7

Sometimes engagement in torture is more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter years. Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, and this is commonly improved by murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists, and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.8

These studies precede the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear. And the tendencies continue to the present.

Obama's decision is most certainly an important step in the right direction. Howevever, the history of surreptitious and indirect American torture strategies would suggest that we cannot be assuaged by this shift. The danger of another war justified by coerced intellegence will persist if there is no concerted effort to ensure all American allies cease their practice of torturing detainees.

Democracy and Freedom

Richard Florida discusses a remarkable new study which analyzes 59 different factors that are potentially 'democratizing'. Surprisingly, just five factors encourage the growth of democratic regimes, while four factors defend a standing democracy. Most interestingly:

The study finds that GDP per capita is negatively associated with the transition to
democracy. Contrary to "modernization theory", the study finds that richer countries are not more likely to become democracies. Richer countries are more likely to remain democracies once they become one.

This study is significant as it presents strong empirical evidence of the failure of economic liberalization in promoting the proliferation of democratic regimes. Of course, you wouldn't need to show an academic study to prove this to an Argentinean or Chilean or Iraqi who has witnessed first-hand that economic liberalization without proper democratic institutions only serves to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and multinationals. But for those who have for so long trumpeted the Washington Consensus and Friedmanian policies for their alleged democratizing effects: I would point to this study as strong support for the intuitive notion that structural reforms and their potential democratic externalities only occur when those reforms emerge from democratic channels.

'The weaponized gospel of Jesus Christ'

http://newhumanist.org.uk/1681

Yesterday's Democracy Now! featured a poignant discussion of the alarming evangelical influence within the most technologically advanced killing force known to man--the US Army. The initial Al Jazeera report -- decried by the military as out-of-context -- showed then top military chaplain of Afghanistan suggesting that the role of the armed forces is to proselytize:

The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That’s what we do. That’s our business.

In response to the harsh accusations that the journalism was 'inappropriate' and 'irresponsible', Al Jazeera released additional footage:

By all means, do as scripture tells you to do and share the word, but be careful how you do it. Do it professionally; represent the Christian faith in a professional manner. Proselytizing is against the rules. That means going out and just actively seeking out somebody. I’m not going to say a lot about it. Just be careful. Remember to represent the Christian faith in a respectable, professional manner. And there are ways to win people to Christ that not overbearing or offensive to people. There are ways to do it.

...Alright, let’s talk about it. What do you think? Our ability to interact with the culture here is important for our mission in this country, so we can eventually hand this thing back over them to let them do their own thing. The more that we win over the hearts and minds, the better we’re going to be in accomplishing our mission to eradicate insurgents and Taliban and everybody else who’s bad. We want more on our side, and we’re not going to have more on our side if they see us as Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, critical people. I’m not saying you don’t share the word. That’s what you do as a Christian. But you share the word in a smart manner: love, respect, consideration for their culture and their religion. That’s what a Christian does is appreciation for other human beings. But at the same time, I’m not telling you not to share the word of God. I’m telling you to share the word of God, but be smart about it, please.

Despite calls for the 'professional' persuasion, soldiers continue to act as armed preachers and provocateurs. For instance, Jeff Sharlet tells the story of a lieutenant John D. Degiulio painting his Bradley fighting vehicle with the message 'Jesus killed Mohammed.' The predictable response to the provocation:

Then, while they put the translator on the roof with a bullhorn, shouting in Arabic, “Jesus killed Mohammed,” and then training their guns, training American guns on anybody who responded, the Bradley fighting vehicle rolled out into the city of Samarra and drawing fire everywhere it went, leading the Special Forces to conclude that every single Iraqi who took offense at these words, “Jesus killed Mohammed,” was part of the enemy and therefore needed to be destroyed.

The standard military line is of course to deny these cases or to marginilize them by playing the 'bad apple' defense. However, new revalations revealing the military's support of various Christian television shows, with "extreme missionaries" -- who embed themselves with US army units and "travel the globe to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission" -- suggest the barrel may be to blame for these crusading bad apples.

Sharlet on the pervasivness of the fundamentalist elements within the military:

And then things really picked up after 9/11, when this group, Officers Christian Fellowship, started seeing America’s conflicts as what they described as “spiritual war.” And what’s really frightening is they describe it as a spiritual conflict between good and evil. They describe Mikey Weinstein as Satanic. This show would be Satanic from their perspective. And that’s the problem. They see—not only do they see those whom they’re fighting overseas as part of the opposition, but they see even those within the military who are not a part of their movement as, at best, unwitting tools of Satan.

I mean, this sounds like loony stuff, but then you look at the size of the organization. It’s 15,000 members. It’s growing at three percent a year. It’s represented on 80 percent of military installations around the world. And you see, really, the fruition of a very long campaign that predates George Bush, to view the military as what missionaries called a mission field, not a branch of government, but as a place to go and harvest souls. And they’ve been successful now. And as Mikey Weinstein says, they’re so dominant within the military that they have become, in some ways, the mainstream rather than the fringe.

"Hundreds of thousands" of translated bibles being dropped in America's obliterated theaters of war could not be a worse way to win over the 'hearts and minds' of those ravaged by American occupation. The brazen fundamental elements within the military who have ambitions to delivery the word of God while fully equipped with the most technological advanced tools of war can only serve as agitators. Shockingly, these evangelic elements -- who make it their priority to spread to word of God -- are being institutionally embraced, says Jeff Sharlet:

After Vietnam, you stopped seeing a lot of liberal chaplains from the liberal Christian denominations. They didn’t want to serve in the military anymore. It really accelerated under Ronald Reagan, who took away all the restrictions and regulations that ensured, when you saw a chaplain in the military, it really was a little bit like Father Mulcahy, you know, someone who—Father Mulcahy in MASH is Catholic, but, of course, he can help and minister to everybody, and he’s trained to do that. Reagan wiped that out, so that the Chaplain Corps became predominantly fundamentalist. Some chaplains estimate today it’s about 80 percent fundamentalist.

The military cannot assume the affectation of being a force of democratization and freedom in the Muslim world as long as it institutionally embraces staunch Christian denominations and overlooks the contemptuous machinations of its crusaders. The alarming instances that have been surfacing can only be truly confronted if they are understood with respect to a systemic insensitivity to the Muslim world. This must be repaired, the military cannot be complacent. The only remedy is to embrace liberal values, even at the steep price of compromising the religious ambitions of its fundamental elements. If sensitivity and modernity are the causalities of radical fervor, moderate Muslims will become increasingly alienated and those that raise arms to American empire will only be provided with additional fodder.

Torture and Dualism

Matthew Schmitz sees the torture debate as an opportunity to attack dualism:

The body is not property that can be disposed of however one wants. This Lockean view, that we are citizens who “have” bodies (instead of being citizens who are bodies) leads to a state that, just as it can seize property when it wants to build a highway, can torture a body when it wants to win a war. Maybe this means that we all deserve blame for torture to the extent that we buy into a shared cultural idea that undergirds many of the not-so-bad things we do, but is ultimately capable of buttressing brutality.

The philosophical ideals that legitimize dubious practices must be reevaluated in the wake of several crippling critiques. Any claim that the mind and body are separate entities is deeply flawed in light of the discoveries of modern neuroscience. Although Schmitz's torture-dualism link is somewhat tenuous, belief in the immaterial as a means to assuaging the guilt and responsibility of questionable practices is a deeply entrenched American practice. There is no doubt that men and woman in stripes seek vindication from something immaterial--a God or a flag. Furthermore, there is no doubt that men in power continue to exploit this belief of the immaterial to serve their own ends. I am troubled by those who feel vindicated -- even compelled -- by God or country to employ insidious means to reach questionable and uncertain ends. What makes this enterprise inevitably disastrous is that there is no way to gauge the legitimacy of claims with respect to the non-existent immaterial world. Any atrocity is possible when people can be manipulated by a concept where one can never, by definition, look to facts for answers.

Banks are the moral champions of the marketplace!?

Foreclosures are good for nobody. They put families out of their homes, reduce property values, and leave the bank with an albatross of a property in a poor market. One would think that the bank would take every measure to restructure and prevent foreclosure. Not so, observes Steve Meacham on last week's Bill Moyers Journal:

One of the unheralded things about this crisis right now is that there's an awful lot of owners who come to us who cannot afford their home at the inflated value, at the adjustable rate mortgage price. But they have plenty of income to afford their home at the real value at a 30-year fixed. And so why not just give them the property back at that amount? If they're foreclosed on, the best the bank that can do is sell the property at the real value. By definition, that is the absolute best.

If Deutsche Bank forecloses on Joe Schmoe the best they can do is to sell that property at real value. So if Joe Schmoe can afford the property at real value, why not sell it back to him? But the only reason the banks aren't doing that is because of what they call moral hazard. They say basically that homeowners should be punished because they signed these loan documents.

These are the same guys who have run our entire economy into the ground and who have been rewarded with billions in taxpayer bailouts and have used billions of that money to give bonuses to the very executives that drove their companies and the whole economy into the ground. And they are citing moral hazard as the reason why they can't resell that property to the existing homeowners at the real value. That is disgusting and hypocritical and in the extreme.

Don't ever trust your laissez-faire friend to be designated driver

In the midst of the greatest financial catastrophe since the great depression, already we are being bombarded with revisionist accounts of our collapse. The Bush administration will dismiss any notion that they are to bear blame, rather opting for the this has been brewing before I got here defense or shifting the blame to wall street greed--as if these Ayn Rand-ians ever had a problem with greed (see Greenspan's devotion to the ignominious author of pop-fiction spuriously christened as philosophy).

Mr. Bush claims that "wall street got drunk," but Naomi Klien quips that "Mr. Bush was serving the drinks."

Klien might be on to something; the NY Times reports that, at the very least, our laissez-faire protectors knew of the liberal servings of libations and rejected the possibility of our reckoning:

A soft-spoken Texan, Mr. Falcon ran the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, a tiny government agency that oversaw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two pillars of the American housing industry. In February 2003, he was finishing a blockbuster report that warned the pillars could crumble.

. . .

Mr. Falcon’s report outlined a worst-case situation in which Fannie and Freddie could default on debt, setting off “contagious illiquidity in the market” — in other words, a financial meltdown. He also raised red flags about the companies’ soaring use of derivatives, the complex financial instruments that economic experts now blame for spreading the housing collapse.

Today, the White House cites that report — and its subsequent effort to better regulate Fannie and Freddie — as evidence that it foresaw the crisis and tried to avert it. Bush officials recently wrote up a talking points memo headlined “G.S.E.’s — We Told You So.”

But the back story is more complicated. To begin with, on the day Mr. Falcon issued his report, the White House tried to fire him.

. . .

His warnings were buried in the next day’s news coverage, trumped by the White House announcement that Mr. Bush would replace Mr. Falcon, a Democrat appointed by Bill Clinton, with Mark C. Brickell, a leader in the derivatives industry that Mr. Falcon’s report had flagged.

Jason Thomas' unheeded warnings (same article):

Typically, as home prices increase, rental costs rise proportionally. But Mr. Thomas sent charts to top White House and Treasury officials showing that the monthly cost of owning far outpaced the cost to rent. To Mr. Thomas, it was a sign that housing prices were wildly inflated and bound to plunge, a condition that could set off a foreclosure crisis as conventional and subprime borrowers with little equity found they owed more than their houses were worth.

People must remember that the neo-conservatives in office are ideologically opposed to financial or housing regulations or any sort of corruption of the precarious free-market. So trapped are these economists in their dogmatic principles, much like the rigid Communists of old, that only if their purity is achieved will their plans work. The concessions made today do not mark an ideological shift, but they are the pathetic last life-lines of unimaginative clowns (it would indeed be a grand comedy if such veritable despair were not the result). There remains still opposition to the idea of moderation, regulations, worker's rights(see the ignoble attacks on blue-collar autoworkers), and what they might besmirch as banal Keynesian economics. The financial bailout is more-or-less a grand swindle with the cursory hope of restoring our confidence in inadequate casino-capitalism and not an attempt at restructuring the very fabric of what makes our economy so precarious, environmentally unsustainable, inequitable and subject to such arduous boom-bust cycles.

The grand swindle is becoming painfully obvious

Part of a letter sent to congress declaring over 100 prominent economists' reasons for disdaining the bailout:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries “systemic risk.” The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America’s dynamic and innovative private-capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

The AP on a lack of transparency:

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

. . .

There has been no accounting of how banks spend that money. Lawmakers summoned bank executives to Capitol Hill last month and implored them to lend the money — not to hoard it or spend it on corporate bonuses, junkets or to buy other banks. But there is no process in place to make sure that's happening and there are no consequences for banks that don't comply.

Naomi Klien draws parallels between the corporatist nature of the bailout and that of Iraqi reconstruction:

Still the original impulse underscores the many worrying parallels between the administration's approach to the financial crisis and its approach to the Iraq War. Under cover of an emergency, Treasury is rapidly turning into an economic Green Zone, overrun with private companies collecting lucrative contracts. Fittingly, one of the first to line up at the new trough was none other than the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani — yes, that Giuliani. The firm's chairman, Patrick Oxford, could scarcely conceal his glee over the prospect of cashing in on the bailout. "This one," he told reporters, "is very, very big." At least four times bigger, in fact, than the post-9/11 homeland-security bubble, from which Giuliani and his various outfits have profited so extravagantly. Even bigger, potentially, than the price tag for the Iraq War itself.

A Shoe for Two

The Iraqi journalist who chucked both his shoes at President Bush after denouncing him as a "dog" was practicing the "worst insult in the Arab world" in attacking Bush. The size-10 heater was not a simple show of anger, but a calculated symbol reflecting much of the disdain for Bush war policy.

The Globe and Mail reports that the insult is a potent symbol of disrespect in the Arab world:

As the lowest part of the body, the foot is the filthiest in Arab culture, sharing space on the ground with animal waste and other refuse. It's farthest from the head, and the farthest from heaven.

Another symbolic shoe-related insult. . .

Not such a lame duck(er)

Bush's legacy, I fear, will be viewed largely as the incompetency of a myopic ideologue who oversaw two failed wars and a momentous financial crisis. The truth is much more nefarious than the caricature; the Bush administration has set a dangerous precedence by assuming ultimate authority of the executive branch and employing quasi-legal trickery in justifying villainous torture policy.

Glenn Greenwald on America's conflicting interpretation of justice:

We have less than five percent of the world's population. And yet 25 percent almost of prisoners worldwide are inside the United States. What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.

The recently penned bi-partisan Senate Armed Services Committee report linking Bush top administration officials directly to detainee abuse is evidence that Bush administration failures are very much systemic and intentional and not a failure of foresight.

The approach the main stream media has utilized in addressing the question of his legacy has been incongruous with the somber reality. It seems to me as if "lame duck" is not a fitting title for a man with such shoe-evasion skill. The shoe incident and the resulting support for the shoe thrower remind us just how much animosity remains for this President and his besmirched legacy. However, the Senate report has been largely ignored in favor of the vitriolic stories regarding that joke Blagoyevich. Shallow media-induced rancor captivates us while indisputable evidence of war crimes falls on deaf ears-- it's no wonder people throw shoes at our leaders.