Category: Politics

Yes, I know it’s from Capitol Hill Blue, but it certainly seems compelling:

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

First we had the Bush administration paying US media outlets and journalists to carry propaganda as “news”, and giving press credentials to political operatives. Now they’re playing the same kind of game in Iraq. From the LA Times: U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press. Money quote: “Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as ‘Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,’ since the effort began this year. The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military.”

And this is how we spread “democratic principles” and “political transparency”?

(Via Stephen Elliott in HuffPo.)

The opening of Simon Whitaker’s piece “Nowhere to run” in today’s Guardian commands attention:

There is a remarkable article in the latest issue of the American Jewish weekly, Forward. It calls for President Bush to be impeached and put on trial ‘for misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them’. To describe Iraq as the most foolish war of the last 2,014 years is a sweeping statement, but the writer is well qualified to know.

A couple of apparently unrelated things happened earlier this month. First, I went through the annual ritual called Open Enrollment, during which I reviewed all of the optional elements of my Sun benefits (health insurance, dental coverage, health spending accounts, life insurance, and so forth) and selected the coverage that I wanted for the next year. Secondly, Peter Drucker, the man that the Wall Street Journal called “the first philosopher of management”, died at the age of 95.

So what’s the connection? First, Drucker:

From “Is Executive Pay Excessive?” May 23, 1977: Economically, [the] few very large executive salaries are quite unimportant. Socially, they do enormous damage. They are highly visible and highly publicized. And they are therefore taken as typical, rather than as the extreme exceptions they are.

These few very large salaries are being explained by the “need” to pay the “market price” for executives. But this is nonsense. Every executive knows perfectly well that it is the internal logic of a hierarchical structure that explains them…. Money is a status symbol which defines an executive’s place in the corporate hierarchy. And the more levels there are the more pay does the man at the top have to get. This rewards people for creating additional levels of management…. Yet levels of management should be kept to the minimum….

If and when the attack on the “excessive compensation of executives” is launched–and I very much fear that it will come soon–business will complain about the public’s “economic illiteracy” and will bemoan the public’s “hostility to business.” But business will have only itself to blame. It is a business responsibility, but also a business self-interest, to develop a sensible executive compensation structure that portrays economic reality and asserts and codifies the achievement of U.S. business in this century: the steady narrowing of the income gap between the “boss man” and the “working man.”

Second, health insurance. One of the providers from which I get to choose is United Health. (It’s probably a violation of some company policy for me to say this; on the other hand, the concentration of this industry is such that almost every large company offers something from everybody. And I imagine the information is publicly available.) On November 28th, Forbes reported that the salary of William McGuire, CEO of United Health Group last year was $124.8 million. (He cashed in stock options worth $115 million; he currently owns stock options worth $1 billion.) Just to take an area that I know well, a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist makes around $75 dollars per hour; William McGuire makes $115,384 dollars an hour. What on earth can justify this discrepancy? It certainly isn’t “market forces”; I’m pretty sure that the board of UBH could find a perfectly competent CEO that would do the job for a mere $1 million.

As Robert Kuttner put it in today’s Boston Globe:

Health insurance is the most vivid case of what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls a ”politics of excluded alternatives.” Polls consistently show that over two-thirds of Americans want universal tax-supported health insurance. Gallup found that 79 percent of Americans want coverage for all, and 67 percent don’t mind if taxes are raised to pay for it. Fully 78 percent are dissatisfied with the present system. Medicare, the one part of the system that is true national health insurance (for seniors) is overwhelmingly popular.

There is no hotter political issue, nor one that strikes closer to home. So, if Americans overwhelmingly want national health insurance, why don’t we get it? Three huge reasons: political, fiscal, and jurisdictional.

Politically, the immensely powerful private insurance industry would be displaced by national health insurance. Nearly all corporations would rather suffer with the devil that they know (escalating premiums) than the devil they hate (an expanded role for government)….

Fiscally, a shift to national health insurance would require about $700 billion that currently goes through the private sector in charges to workers and consumers and shifted to the public sector in the form of taxes. The result would be a far more efficient and reliable system, but many voters would see the increased taxes but not appreciate the savings in premium costs, payroll deductions, or out-of-pocket charges.

Jurisdictionally, states like Massachusetts can perhaps make some piecemeal progress, but it’s hard to do this right in one state without pushing the system toward further fragmentation. Medicare works because it’s a national program.

But let’s get back to McGuire’s $124 million. Obviously the public wouldn’t stand for a government official pulling in that kind of money. Instead, that sum would comfortably cover the premiums for all of the uninsured workers here in Massachusetts. As I blogged recently, it’s amazing that so many in American business are opposed to single-payer government-administered health insurance, even though it is demonstrably in their best interests (and the interests of their shareholders and employees) that such a program be adopted. And it’s a sad commentary on American politics that no political party is willing to stand up for a policy demanded by two-thirds of the people of the USA.

From CNN.com: “A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the ‘philosophical guidance’ and ‘flexibility’ that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities.Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.‘There’s no question in my mind that we did. There’s no question in my mind that we may be still doing it,’ Wilkerson said on CNN’s ‘Late Edition. ‘There’s no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated — in the vice president of the United States’ office,’ he said. ‘His implementer in this case was [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department.’“

So what exactly is the process for impeaching the Vice President?

In a recent article in the Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan contrasts the values of Bush-and-Blair with those of their frequently-cited* hero, Winston Churchill:

In a telegram on November 21, 1943, Winston Churchill defined a fundamental difference between the Anglo-American way of war and that of our enemies. Churchill wrote: ‘The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.’

Perhaps Tony Blair and George W. Bush regard Winston Churchill as a bleeding heart lefty. But what Churchill’s view represents is an old, very basic principle of Anglo-American warfare and justice: fight war with ferocity, but never lose your democratic soul.

Yes indeed. And Bush-and-Blair’s betrayal of this principle is one of the most tragic aspects of this whole sorry affair. It is depressing to think how easily a demagogue (or a puppet) can push a democratic nation towards totalitarianism….

—
*For example, “Sometimes Churchill will talk back, sometimes he won’t, depending upon the stress of the moment, but he is a constant reminder of what a great leader is like.” — Dubya’s assessment of Winston Churchill, who has been deceased for 35 years. Washington, DC, July 16, 2001

So Parliament has handed Tony Blair the black eye that he deserves. From the BBC: “Tony Blair has suffered his first defeat after MPs rejected his plan to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. MPs rejected the plans by a bigger than expected margin of 322 votes to 291, before later backing a 28 day limit. The defeat came despite Mr Blair saying MPs had a ‘duty’ to support the police. Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair should resign after failing to ‘carry his party’ but Downing Street says it was not a confidence issue.”

As Enoch Powell famously observed, “All political careers end in failure.” Blair should recognize that this now applies to him. The old Blair would never have allowed himself to get into this situation; one has to wonder whether he actually wanted to be defeated.

On the one hand, a row of unsold gas-guzzling behemoths, from One Giant Metaphor, reporting on a “Hummer dealer… in a panic…. year-to-year sales down about 50%,”

On the other hand, a photograph that I took in Hyderabad a couple of weeks ago, of a family of five on a motor scooter:

[N.b. I’ve grabbed a copy of the Hummer pic because linking to the original was unreliable. Hope that’s OK.]

Here’s an excellent piece by Cenk Uygur on why the nomination of Miers represents the recognition that, at some deep level, the American people don’t agree with the conservative movement:

“Name one liberal or moderate judge who has ever been rejected from the Supreme Court because they were outside the American mainstream. There aren’t any. I suppose a judge could be too liberal for the Supreme Court, but no one has even approached this theoretical barrier. On the other hand, Republican presidents play hide and go seek with their nominee’s points of view on a consistent basis because they are afraid Americans will be scared off by what they really believe.”

(Via HuffPo.)

Rick Brookhiser in the National Review Online: “It’s not as bad as Caligula putting his horse in the Senate.”

Not quite. And this from a Bush supporter, apparently having a Brownie moment. After all, we’re talking about a woman who has reportedly called George W. Bush “the smartest man she’s ever known”. This immediately disqualifies her, on grounds of judgement or experience – take your pick.

(Via Sully.)