So, why did one man mergers and acquisition chop shop Steve Rattner abruptly leave his position as head of the Obama Automobile task force?
Sorry, but this smells like something started to rot here.
Category: White House
Eric Holder and False Accountability
Glenn Greenwald has the scoop, and it’s even lamer than what was clearly a set of deliberate leaks by Eric Holder and His Evil* Minions™ that were covered in the Newsweek article.
According to the Washington Post, which notes that, “The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation,” and the New York Times, which observes that, “The Justice Department official who confirmed the likelihood of an inquiry said it was not likely to focus on those legal opinions, the lawyers who wrote them or anyone who acted within the boundaries they set, even though the ground rules for interrogations have shifted,” it’s clear that real accountability for real crimes is not on the table.
For the small fry, “Just following [illegal] orders,” will be considered an absolute defense, and and the people who actually gave those illegal orders, and who did so without regard to the law or legal precedents, will not be subject to scrutiny.
I understand the possible political complications, though I think that they are stupid, because the Republicans will oppose Obama tooth and nail every step of the way regardless of his peace overtures, but even if non-prosecution were to produce a more bipartisan atmosphere, it would be wrong, because covering up a crime against humanity, and make no bones about it, torture is a crime against humanity, is a crime in and of itself.
*Evil is the only way to describe this concerted effort to ensure that the people who authorized, and enabled torture never face justice. By deliberately ignoring the law in this matter, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama have become co-conspirators for torture after the fact.
What Barry Ritholtz Said
In his post, Dear Lord, Anyone but Lawrence Summers . . . , about the possibility of Larry being Fed chair:
I read articles like these with dread and horror:
…
So help me God, if Obama nominates this incompetent, lacking-in-judgment jackboot to the FOMC chair, then in 2012, I will write in George W. Bush’s name for President . . .
I’m not that angry, but writing in Ron Paul’s name is beginning to look appealing.
BTW, in his description of Mssr. Summers, he left off “corrupt.”
The inestimable Mark Ames wrote about that almost a year ago.
Obama is Dog Whistle Gay Bashing
Normally, I’m not a big fan of protest theatrics, to my mind, Code Pink frequently does more harm than good to the cause, but I have to approve of ACT-UP’s chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda today.
What’s going on here is that during the campaign, Barack Obama promised to lift the ban on funding needle exchange programs, which:
- Do not encourage drug use.
- Reduce AIDS transmission.
- Reduce the cost to society.
- Provide an entry point with addicts for counseling.
The problem is that the White House submitted a budget to Congress still contained the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs.
So this wasn’t even a matter of his not fighting for the program, it’s a matter of him submitting language reauthorizing a program that he explicitly campaigned against in his budget.
A president’s budget is purely advisory. Congress can, and does, amend it, or ignore it, as they see fit, but he is unwilling to even leave out a bit of language authorizing a program he claims to oppose.
I’m with John Aravosis’s take on this
- The candidate promised to lift the ban.
- The White House Web site reaffirmed the president’s commitment to lifting the ban.
- The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
- The president now refuses to lift the ban.
- The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting [and] defending the ban.
- The spokesman reiterates the president’s support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.
There is a pattern to all this, whether it’s his sucking up to homophobic screeds “reformed homosexual” Donnie McClurkin, using legal arguments equating gay marriage with pedophilia and incest, refusing to take administrative actions to even modestly impede the anti-gay witch hunt in the military, and now affirmatively submitting anti-gay legislation to Congress.
Either there is some real homophobia here, or there has been a political calculus made that appealing to homophobia is a political win, because the opposition wants gay people dead.
At best, it’s no different than the prosecutors in and around Baltimore who will routinely demand more severe sentences in plea bargains for black defendants, because they know that they have a better chance to convict a black man, even in front of a black jury.
I believe that this action has been taken because it can be seen as a gay issue, not in spite of it.
This is dog-whistle gay bashing, and it is quite deliberate.
It Would Be Nice if Obama Didn’t Try So Hard to Emulate the Worst Excesses of Bush and His Evil Minions&trade
In this case, it’s his veto threat of the intelligence authorization bill, because the notification requirements have been strengthened in it.
As opposed to just notifying the gang of 8 (4 actually) who are not allowed to discuss the contents with anyone else, the whole intelligence committee would have to be notified.
It appears that Barack Obama wants to preserve the, “long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters,” which BTW, involves the CIA having, “affirmatively lied to” the panel, according to House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes.
The idea that a briefing be given in a closed room, with no notes taken, and so few people as to make verification of a felony impossible is somehow “comity,” is setting George Orwell spinning so rapidly in his grave that he could power all of Sussex.
Reid Shows Sanaty on Healthcare, Rahmbo, on the Other Hand….
It appears that Majority Leader Harry Reid just told finance chair Max Baucus to stop moving the bill to the right in an attempt to get Republican votes:
According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.
This actually makes sense. Any healthcare reform that works will cripple the Republican Party for at least a generation, so accommodating the Republicans means that you are making sure that the plan will fail.
Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is doing his best to kill a public option:
It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said.
“The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest,” he said in an interview. “The goal is non-negotiable; the path is” negotiable.
President Barack Obama has campaigned vigorously for a full public option. But he’s also said that he won’t draw a “line in the sand” over this point. On Tuesday, the White House issued a statement reiterating his support for a public plan.
I think that Emanuel believes that a big war chest is the only determinant to winning elections, and he does not want to offend the deep pockets of the insurance industry.
His actions as the head of the DCCC, when he decided to ran the hapless Tammy Duckworth at the expense of Christine Cegelis in the Illinois Congressional 6th district, where he dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the primary, and over a million in the general, keeping a Republican in the seat, are a good example of why his “campaign funds trump everything,” philosophy is a complete lose.
Veto Threat on F-22 and F136 Authorizations
President Obama has threatened a veto on both programs.
I’m of a mixed mind on the programs.
While it is clear that the F-22 is overpriced, and does not address foreseeable threats, the F136 alternate engine for the JSF seems like a good idea.
The P&W F100/GE F110 engine competition saved a lot of money, and produced more reliable engines.
What’s more, the F136 seems to have more growth potential than the F135, and this is needed, particularly for the STOVL F-35B.
Additionally, the funds to continue F136 development are about the cost of procuring just 2 more F-22s.
How Barack Obama F%$#s the Progressive in Congress
Case in point, freshman Representative Tom Perriello, who was aggressively lobbied to vote for the cap and trad bill, he thought that it was a sellout, and originally intended to vote against it, and is now being targeted by the GOP on this vote.
On the other hand, blue dogs, like Gene Taylor, were allowed to vote their campaign dollars “conscience”, and were not aggressively lobbied.
Perriello’s margin in his campaign, just 727 votes, while Gene Taylor, “He won 74.6% of the vote in 2008, and 79.8% in 2006.”
This is about campaign money. Rahm Emanuel and His Evil Minions™ think that the blue dogs are critical in getting big money campaign donations, and that if you have to sacrifice a few progressive Dems to secure that, they don’t raise the big bucks, so screw them.
Read Bob Herbert
Seriously, excerpts do not do justice to his essay on Mohammed Jawad, where he describes the US government torturing a 12-16 year old boy, and now is attempting to use his tortured confession to keep him confined, but here are the last 2 ‘graphs:
There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the Obama administration does not feel that he has suffered enough. Not only have administration lawyers opposed defense efforts to secure Jawad’s freedom, but they are using, as the primary basis for their opposition, the fruits of the confession that was obtained through torture and has already been deemed inadmissible — without merit, of no value.
[Jawad’s former prosecutor] Colonel Vandeveld is no longer on active duty and has joined the effort by military defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union to secure Jawad’s freedom. Six years of virtual solitary confinement, he said, is enough for someone who was not much older than a child when he was taken into custody.
(emphasis mine)
Barack Obama, tear down that wall.
But he won’t because it’s inconvenient.
If Only the Czar Knew
This is an interesting article on how Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have successfully neutralized Paul Volcker’s attempts to create meaningful reform in the financial industry.
The subtext that the article misses is that this is that this is not Summers’ or Geithner’s doing, it is Barack Obama’s doing.
The fact that Paul Volker has been marginalized is obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, and President Obama is not a stupid man.
The increases in regulation and the reform have been held to a minimum because that is what Obama wants.
The Rude Pundit is a F&^%ing Genius
I can’t add anything to his, very profane, coverage of Barack Obama’s press conference.
Go read.
Here is the embedded video.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Well, Here’s a Bit of Good Politics in the Financial Overhaul
On the top right, we have the reorganization of the various financial institutions.
Let’s zoom in a bit in the right hand side, and we see that Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS)will both be eliminated.
The elimination of the OTS is no surprise, apart perhaps from Greenspan’s Federal Reserve, it was the agency most complicit with the bubble.
That being said, the elimination of the OCC is a very good thing. The head of the office was appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, and has a 5 year term, which makes it rather difficult for Obama to get rid of him.
The problem is that the current Comptroller John C. Dugan, has been a roadblock on almost any sort of regulation.
He’s successfully gone to the Supreme Court to preempt state regulations, and he has been a major impediment in implementing even the tepid regulations that the Obama administration has proposed.
They are killing the office to get rid of him, and even if the change does not pass, it means that for the foreseeable future, there aren’t any banks that will take his instruction without some other agency confirming him.
They just cut Dugan off at the knees, and this action is both wise and well deserved.
Obama’s Reform of Insurance
There is a lot of centralization of regulations at the federal level here.
Whether it’s good or not turns on one bit of information, and I’m not sure if it’s available yet.
If the regulations say that it in no way preempts stricter state regulation, it’s good. If it preempts stricter state regulation, it’s bad.
Because going to a single preemptive regulator is an invitation to regulatory capture that will make AIG look like a lemonade stand.
Reviews are Coming in On Obama Regulation Plan
And there is a lot of skepticism, particularly about expanding the Federal Reserve’s regulatory role, because, as Alan “Bubbles” demonstrated, you could end up with an incompetent lunatic running the most opaque organization in Washington, see here, here, here
They should be concerned. While insulation from oversight and public input might be a good thing when one manages the monetary system and has to create a recession to reign in inflation, it is not when you are talking about regulating agencies.
I think that this is something that Lawrence Summers wanted, because he believes that Obama will appoint him to succeed “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke, and he wants more authority at what he sees as his future position.
One thing that does concern me is that one of the biggest failures in this of failures, the corruption in the way ratings agencies like S&P and Moody’s operate, is largely untouched.
I’m unimpressed, but I agree with Paul Krugman when he says, “One thing I was concerned about was whether this consumer financial protection agency would be toothless , but the opposition of [a bank lobby group] makes me believe that it’s not such a bad idea after all,” when he talks about moving the regulation of consumer loans out of the Federal Reserve and move it to a dedicated consumer credit protection agency.
It’s too little, too timid, and too friendly to the forces that created this in the first place.
Calling Cheney’s Bluff
There is a 2004 report by the CIA on torture, the so called “Holy Grail,” (also here) and, according to Congressional sources who have seen the classified document, it completely demolishes Dick Cheney’s arguments.
It shows what we already know: Torture does not work, and torture did not work.
This should be released, but Obama and His Clueless Minions™, will try everything possible to prevent it, because the more evidence that comes out, the greater the push for prosecutions, because it will show what was done, and that Bush and His Evil Minions™ were told that it did not work.
The Obama administration believes that he needs bipartisan support to implement his agenda, and that prosecutions and investigations of Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. will prevent this.
The truth is that neither Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid passed with very few Republican votes(none in the case of Social Security), and the benefits of these programs are legion.
The other fact is that the big items on Obama’s agenda would require Republicans to cut their own throats to support him.
Republican support of new financial regulation and stimulus would require them declare that their guiding governmental philosophy since Reagan is a failure, and Republican support for a good public healthcare option would add at least 20 years to their time in the minority, because everyone in the United States would see the personal benefit to “big government”.
Simply put, it is not realistic to expect people to commit suicide for you, particularly when they are your opposition, but Obama continues to work for this, because, he believes that reasonable discourse and his eloquence will work.
This is a delusion. Not only do today’s Republicans not understand the concept of loyal opposition, it is not reasonable for them to support him, because the political fallout is all negative for them.
Obama’s Weak Tea on Gay Rights
So, Obama is extending ‘some’ federal benefits to gay partners, and as Pam Spaulding notes, it’s awfully meaningless and ill conceived.
First, as is noted in the New York Times, but buried in the last ‘graph, it’s not intended to be meaningful change:
But administration officials said the timing of the announcement was intended to help contain the growing furor among gay rights groups. Several gay donors withdrew their sponsorship of a Democratic National Committee fund-raising event next week, where Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to speak.
Further, it’s not even an executive order, but an administrative memorandum, so it expires when he leaves office.
It also does not cover health benefits, so what is left to cover? The only thing that comes to mind is relocation benefits.
And they are leaking the reasons to make clear that people don’t think that this is the start of a trend to support gay rights, it’s just a ploy to appease people before a fundraiser.
LBTG’s of America, welcome to under the bus, where supporters of government transparency, accountability for war crimes and torture for Bush and His Evil Minions™, and meaningful reform of the financial system were thrown months ago.
It’s not particularly comfortable here, and now it’s getting very crowded.
It’s Like Dick Cheney in Drag
Yep, the Obama administration, and they are refusing to release visitor logs to the press:
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.
**sigh**
A Portrait of Regulatory Capture
So the details of Obama’s regulatory plans for finance are leaking out, and the picture is not good.
The New York Times makes a big deal about how all the stake-holders were brought in and given a voice:
President Obama’s plan to reshape financial regulation, which he will unveil on Wednesday, is the product of weeks of meetings among government officials, financial experts, lawmakers, industry executives and lobbyists, many of whom were invited to help the White House draft the proposal.
…
In the last two weeks alone, the administration has heard from top executives from Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Allstate, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Travelers, Prudential and Wells Fargo, among others. Administration officials also discussed the president’s plan with the top lobbyists at major financial trade associations in Washington.
So we ave the wrong and incompetent (financial experts), and the criminal and corrupt (industry executives and lobbyists) brought into the big tent in order to make one big happy family on the legislation.
As a result, they get very little right, they just rearrange the deck chairs, giving the Federal Reserve, the least accountable and most culpable of the banking regulators an expanded role, and create a “council of regulators,” which will serve to do nothing. It will be where meaningful regulation goes to die.
We already have a model for regulation that works: Roosevelt’s regulatory regime set up during the Depression.
It worked until the mid-1970s when Jimmy Carter started, and Ronald Reagan pushed to excess regulation.
About the only rule you need to add to all that is the rule that any new financial instrument is illegal until approved by a regulatory agency.
People may complain that this curtails “innovation,” but “innovation” is what got us here.
Obama Getting Hammered on Selling Out Gays
It’s got the Human Rights Campaign up in arms, finally.
They’ve been a captive of the Obama administration for some time, and it’s nice that they have found some guts.
What’s more it looks like people are bailing from the DNC’s very high profile $1000 a person gay fundraiser as a result.
Additionally, the New York Times blasted Obama on his call to defend the law, noting that Obama’s assertion that the DoJ was compelled to defend the statute is simply not true.
Palau????
Seriously, I’ll always take pneumonia (Obama/Biden) over metastasized lung cancer (McCain/Palin) any day, but the cowardice we are seeing over the Guantanamo detainees, particularly the Uighurs, from both the White House and Democrats in Congress is truly revolting.
We abducted them with out evidence or cause, then tortured them at the request of the Chinese Communists, and held them for 7 years, and now, in order to wash their hands of a truly repulsive Republican talking point, Obama is bribing the government of Palau to the tune of $200 million, or about $10,000.00 for every man, woman, and child in that tiny pacific nation, so that he can ship them off to there, as opposed to bringing them to the US, where there is a large community, and they would have some sort of support structure.
This is truly an exercise in cowardice.