Saturday, November 22, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
By David Brauer | Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008
With about a sixth of the votes recounted, Norm Coleman's margin fell 43 votes to 172. (Or 174 if you're the Strib, which is running its own total and includes more ballots.) Not included in that number: 221 challenged ballots (269 according to the Strib); Coleman's folks challenged 115 to Al Franken's 106. The state Canvassing Board will decide those in December.
Older, less-sensitive optical scanners boosted Franken's total in DFL St. Louis County, the Strib's Larry Oakes reports. Republicans might freak that Franken won all 11 "found" votes where too-faint lines connected arrows. However, the Coleman troops don't cry foul. Seven of the 18 precincts using the pre-2000 equipment remain to be counted.
Observers behaving peevishly: A Coleman challenger in St. Paul (video) had ballot objections overruled as "frivolous," the PiPress' Rachel Stassen-Berger reports. According to the Strib, Coleman lawyers told Ramsey County elections chief Joe Mansky that he couldn't act pre-emptively, but Mansky prevailed after boasting, "I'm going to win all those challenges, I guarantee 100 percent." (There were similar problems in Washington County, Stassen-Berger notes, and bickering in Minneapolis, says the Strib' Mark Brunswick.)
Scattered problems from around the state: Funky arrows in Anoka County. A prematurely sealed envelope near Mankato; same in Willmar, with bonus stacking problems. Coffee-stained Coleman ballots in Worthington.
Smoother recount sailing: Only a few clueless around Fergus Falls and near Fargo. Stassen-Berger teases a Fox News reporter who was disappointed the recounting didn't resemble pro wrestling. Hey, go interview Joltin' Joe Mansky!
You'll kick yourself if you do not play election judge in MPR's "Is-It-Valid?" ballot game — using actual challenged votes! Staffer Than Tibbets had on her thinking cap when she created this one, and helpfully includes statutes for you to rule by. It's tempting to settle all recount challenges this way, if you trusted unscientific electronic voting.
Franken won the right to get rejected absentee voters' names, at least in Ramsey County, the PiPress' Emily Gurnon writes. The campaign can also get written explanations of why ballots were rejected but can't orally quiz local election officials. The Coleman campaign fumed Franken would cherrypick supporters' ballots; the Strib's Pat Lopez and Curt Brown say Franken's forces played coy but have contacted individual voters before. Minnesota Independent's Chris Steller talks to one who's worried about her vote....
Friday, November 21, 2008
Why Franken will win (this is only a theory)
By Eric Black | Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008
Three professors (two from Dartmouth, one from UCLA) have published a paper (PDF) showing why many pundits believe that the recount favors Al Franken.
RELATED:
• Lights, camera, Senate recount: National and local media 'brighten' Minneapolis vote-tabulation scene
• The Great Minnesota Recount, Day 1: Franken forces win legal round
• What if the Coleman-Franken contest ends up on the Senate floor?
| Nov. 19 | To Date | |
| % of ballots recounted: | 15.49% | 15.49% |
| How they were originally cast: | Coleman 43%, Franken 40% | Coleman 43%, Franken 40% |
| Net change from recount (not counting challenges): | Franken +43 | Franken +43 |
| Margin before recount: | Coleman +215 | |
| Current margin: | Coleman +172 | |
| Ballots challenged by Franken: | 106 | 106 |
| Ballots challenged by Coleman: | 115 | 115 |
Data from Minnesota Secretary of State's office
This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008
Click here to view this guide as a single page.
U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.
Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.
"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.
Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.
The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:
-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;
-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;
-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"
-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;
-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;
-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;
-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.
Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.
As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:
Joe Biden
There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.
In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.
Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."
With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."
With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world.
"He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."
Rahm Emanuel
Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25."
While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.
Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."
"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"
Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."
Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"
Madeleine Albright
While Obama's house is flush with Clintonian officials like former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig (who was officially named Obama's White House Counsel) and Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in shaping Obama's foreign policy.
"It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have seen in the Persian Gulf," Albright recently wrote. "And it will take time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country."
Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 "Kosovo war," she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed U.S. and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia -- not just Kosovo -- while also seeking to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]." Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free-market principles."
When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright said the U.S. government felt "the Serbs need a little bombing.") She and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing campaign against the province's minorities.
Perhaps Albright's most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. When confronted by Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of "a half-million children … more children than died in Hiroshima," Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." (While defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words "a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.")
Richard Holbrooke
Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.
According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."
Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)
Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."
Dennis Ross
Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama's aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross' team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as "Israel's lawyer."
"The 'no surprises' policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking," wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. "If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.
Martin Indyk
Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton's ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC.
"Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country," Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as "two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they're seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions."
Anthony Lake
Clinton's former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the "September Group," a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to deliver a "savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam."
Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake "was the main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years," according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. "They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti." Clinton nominated Lake as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.
Lee Hamilton
Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert Parry, who has covered Hamilton's career extensively, recently ran a piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: "Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton's carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man."
Susan Rice
Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")
Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, "The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing."
John Brennan
A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama's intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity." While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it "inconsistent with American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" techniques. "There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 interview. "It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents."
Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives."
Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)
Jami Miscik
Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama's transitional team, was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.
"When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein's relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA's Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to 'stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,' " journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. "It's hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama's top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in." What's more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.
John Kerry and Bill Richardson
Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. "Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try?" Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. "According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents."
Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama's, served as Bill Clinton's ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton's December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. "We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX," Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.
While Clinton's Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.
Robert Gates
Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a "smooth transition," Gates "has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama's transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office." The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Ivo H. Daalder
Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.
Sarah Sewall
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, "the Petraeus plan draws intellectual legitimacy from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an 'unprecedented collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.'”
"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose," she wrote in the introduction. "'The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words lack meaning."
Michele Flournoy
Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama's defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: "While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of 'conditional engagement' there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy's thinking." Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.
Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon
Currently employed at Madeline Albright's consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn't make it onto their official bios on Obama's change.gov website. "Donilon was Fannie's general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems," reports the Wall Street Journal.
***
While many of the figures at the center of Obama's foreign policy team are well-known, two of its most important members have never held national elected office or a high-profile government position. While they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress working under John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the current head of the Obama transition.
Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama's. He has worked for Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy SEALs. "According to those who've worked closely with Lippert," Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote in The Nation, "he is a conservative, cautious centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased military spending. 'Even before Obama announced for the presidency, Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,' says a lobbyist who's worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, 'He's clearly more hawkish than the senator.' "
***
Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. "I don't want to just end the war," he said early this year. "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.
"Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war -- and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war -- are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions," observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.
Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are bound to continue advancing it.
Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
How Have You Been Doing? Got Your Turkey Yet?
Child hunger in US rose by 50 percent in 2007
By Kate Randall
20 November 2008
Some 691,000 children went hungry in America in 2007, a rise of 50 percent over the previous year, while one in eight Americans overall struggled to feed themselves. The figures are reported in a study on food security conducted annually by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Of the 36.2 million people who struggled with hunger during the year, almost a third of these adults and children faced a substantial disruption to their food supply, meaning they went hungry at some point. The number of these most hungry Americans has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000, rising to 11.9 million individuals in 2007.
These statistics are all the more alarming since they do not reflect the impact of the current economic crisis. James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, predicted the 2008 numbers would show even more hunger.
"There's every reason to think the increases in the number of hungry people will be very, very large," Weill said, "based on the increased demand we're seeing this year at food stamp agencies, emergency kitchens, Women, Infants and Children clinics, really across the entire social service support structure."
The USDA study covered about 45,600 households, selected as representative of the approximately 118 million households in the US. Households were classified as being "food secure," having "low food security" or having "very low food security," according to their answers to a set of questions, including:
• In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry, but didn't eat, because there wasn't enough money for food?
• Did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food?
Households with children up to 18 years of age were asked additional questions, such as:
• In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of any of the children's meals because there wasn't enough money for food?
• In the last 12 months, did any of the children ever skip a meal because there wasn't enough money for food?
Children were identified as having "very low food security" if they lived in households that answered "yes" to 25 percent or more of the questions asked (calculated according to a formula designed by the study).
Some 691,000 children met the criteria. At some point during the year, these children went to school without breakfast, ate meals providing inadequate calories and nutrients, or went to bed hungry. Their families could not provide for them because they did not have the financial resources to do so.
These statistics translate into real and lasting suffering for society's youngest members. Research has shown that hunger and malnourishment have a profound impact on the mental and physical development of preschool and school-aged children. They are more likely to exhibit higher levels of chronic illness, anxiety and depression, and behavioural problems than well-fed children.
Uncertainty about the ability to provide adequate food is devastating for parents and families, both physically and mentally. Of the 4.7 million families estimated to suffer from very low food security, 98 percent worried that their food would run out before they got money to buy more. Some 94 percent reported that they could not afford to eat balanced meals.
Close to a third of these households reported that on occasion an adult did not eat for an entire day because there was not enough money for food. In 45 percent of these households an adult had lost weight because he or she could not afford enough food. Often parents went without so that the children could eat, or the youngest children ate at the expense of older siblings.
Conditions of hunger for these households were not adequately counteracted by assistance from the three largest federal food and nutrition programs—the Food Stamp Program, the National School Lunch Program and the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)—or by help from food pantries or soup kitchens.
Not surprisingly, the study showed that poverty is the greatest contributing factor to hunger. In 2007, the federal poverty line was set at $21,027 for a family of four, an amount woefully inadequate to provide for sufficient food and nutrition, let alone pay for housing, utilities and other necessities. In households where income fell below this line, food insecurity stood at 37.7 percent.
The rate of food insecurity was 22.2 percent for African-American households and 20.1 percent for Hispanic households. Food insecurity was also more prevalent in households headed by a single parent where there were children—30.2 percent for those headed by women, 18 percent for those headed by men.
Southern states saw the highest rates of food insecurity. Measured over three years, from 2005 through 2007, the states reporting the highest figures were Mississippi (17.4 percent), New Mexico (15 percent), Texas (14.8 percent), and Arkansas (14.4 percent).
Food insecurity is not restricted to inner-city or urban metropolitan areas, but is prevalent in rural and less-populated areas as well. The highest growth in food insecurity over the last nine years has been in the states of Alaska and Iowa, both of which saw a 3.7 percent increase in families who faced substantial food disruptions.
A majority of US households are concerned about the cost of food. A study released last month by the Opinion Research Group, commissioned by Minnesota-based Hormel Food Corp., showed that 84 percent of Americans are worried about rising food prices and 58 percent have had to make cuts in their food purchases as a result.
More than half of those surveyed have had to take steps to reduce food costs, including using more generic or store brands, eating out less often, buying less expensive cuts of meat and increasing their purchases of cheap staples such as potatoes and rice.
Of those polled, 14 percent said they or an immediate family member had received food from a food bank, soup kitchen, shelter or other charitable organization in the past year due to a lack of money for food.
Among those who had not, 21 percent said it is very or somewhat likely that rising food costs, a job loss or other circumstance might force them to seek help for food from a charitable organization in the future. These conditions will inevitably worsen as the economic crisis intensifies.
The growing hunger crisis should be seen within the context of the massive use of taxpayer funds to bail out Wall Street bankers and financiers. Hundreds of billions are being handed over to these interests, while no serious measures are being contemplated to confront a social crisis that will intensify rapidly over the coming months as layoffs mount and the recession deepens.
Waxman Defeats Dingell, Kicks Blue Dog Ass
By: Jane Hamsher Thursday November 20, 2008 8:40 amIn a stinging rebuke of the Blue Dog caucus, Henry Waxman has defeated John Dingell for Chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Why, it seems like only yesterday the Blue Dogs were sniffing that the Steering Committee who recommended Waxman were a bunch of unrepentant hippies who didn't reflect the overall makeup of the Democratic caucus. (In fact, it was.)
This is a huge defeat for the Blue Dogs, who were hoping to use Dingell as a roadblock to keep any meaningful change from happening with regard to issues under the Committee's jurisdiction -- telecommunications and health care, energy and environmental protection, interstate commerce and consumer protection.
Though she never took a public position, nobody has any doubts that Nancy Pelosi orchestrated this.
This week the Senate voted to remain a bunch of self-protecting hacks by letting Lieberman keep his gavel, but the House voted for progress.
Anyone who thinks that other members of the House aren't soiling themselves over this huge blow to the traditional system of seniority and entitlement hasn't been paying attention.
(Oh Heavenly Day video by Patrick Dwyer courtesy Howie Klein)
Panic Grips Wall Street
Posted Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal lead with yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 5.1 percent and closed below the 8,000 mark for the first time since March 2003. The market is now down 43.5 percent from a high point hit a little more than a year ago. USAT notes that the market has "wiped out nearly $10 trillion in wealth since the October 2007 peak," and the WSJ highlights that the recent plunges have nearly wiped out "all the gains from the last bull market, which lasted from October 2002 to October 2007." Optimists who had hoped the market had nowhere to go but up after the lows of last month were hit with a cold dose of reality by a string of grim economic news that made it clear the pain is far from over.
The Los Angeles Times gives big play to the stock market woes but leads with news that the California Supreme Court has agreed to review legal challenges to Proposition 8, the voter initiative that banned same-sex couples from getting married in the state. The court's move suggests that it wants to resolve all issues relating to marriage between two people of the same sex in one ruling. The court refused to allow the marriages to continue until a decision has been made, but legal experts warn this shouldn't be read as a sign that the court is ready to uphold the ban.
Investors looking for reasons to be anxious about the economy's future didn't have to look far. The leaders of Detroit's Big Three were grilled for a second day by skeptical lawmakers who made it pretty clear the U.S. auto industry shouldn't be expecting a bailout. The Federal Reserve's leaders warned that they expect the economy to be in a recession through the middle of next year, if not longer; new data showed that builders started fewer homes last month, marking the fourth straight month of declines to reach the lowest level in at least the 49 years since the government has kept track. And those weren't the only data to reach a record. Perhaps most worrying of all, the Consumer Price Index fell 1 percent in October, its biggest one-month drop in the index's 61-year history.
While the average consumer is likely to welcome a decrease in prices, the decrease can be disastrous for an economy and has brought back the much-talked-about fears of deflation, a prolonged period of falling prices. The NYT focuses on deflation—"an economists' nightmare"—in its lead story, while the WSJ devotes a separate front-page story to the issue. Deflation was "a hallmark of the Depression and Japan's so-called lost decade," notes the NYT. Everyone still thinks the chances of deflation are extremely slim but the fact that it's even a concern ramps up the pressure on President-elect Barack Obama and lawmakers to pass a new fiscal stimulus package. "Whatever I thought that risk was four or five months ago, I think it's bigger now, even if it is still small," Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said. Even talking about deflation now marks an amazing turn of events considering that this summer the big concern was inflation and many economists openly worried about the prospects of stagflation, the simultaneous increase of inflation and unemployment.
The only reason people aren't more freaked out at the record-breaking price decline is that it was mainly due to falling energy prices, which is good for consumers and is generally seen as a bad indicator of long-term trends. Excluding energy and food, prices fell 0.1 percent in October, which is far more modest but hardly insignificant since, as the WSJ notes, it marked the first decline since 1982. The WP points out that broadly speaking, economists worry that "businesses are losing any ability to set prices because demand for their goods has dried up." Due to all the depressing economic news, more consumers are choosing to play it safe and save what they have. Or as one economist succinctly puts it: "People are scared to death." The LAT points out that this decline in spending suggests that the only way the economy will get a boost is through increased government spending. Indeed, the NYT points to a number of statistics that make it seem "clear that the nation is entering a more frugal era after several years of conspicuous consumption."
The nervousness over the economy's future could clearly be seen in the markets, where, as the WSJ points out, investors seem once again to be willing to accept nearly no returns in order to sink their money into the safe haven of short-term Treasury bills. The pain wasn't isolated in stocks. The WSJ highlights that by some measures, "bonds were hit harder than stocks." The WP points out that this anxiety in the bond markets makes it difficult for companies to raise money.
In the WSJ's op-ed page, Andy Kessler says that while investors are taught that they should listen to the stock market, right now you should "stick wax in your ears and don't listen to the market until February." When it's working properly, the market can be a good indicator of the economy as a whole, but due to the credit crisis, Kessler is "convinced the stock market is at its least efficient today," and investors shouldn't read too much into the declines that are sure to come in the next two months.
While investors have lost trillions in the stock market over the past year, many top officials at companies that are at the heart of the current crisis managed to make a pretty penny over the past five years, reveals a WSJ analysis. Fifteen leaders of large home-building and financial firms made more than $100 million in that time period, for example. Among the 15 are the heads of Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns. This is hardly a new phenomenon as periods of economic booms usually translate into astronomical paychecks for those who participated in the bubble. During the technology bubble of the late 1990s, more than 50 people made more than $100 million right before the crash.
The LAT and NYT front, and everyone mentions, the latest news from the presidential transition. President-elect Obama has decided to nominate Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, as secretary of Health and Human Services. Everyone sees the nomination as a sign that Obama plans to aggressively tackle health care since Daschle is an experienced legislator who wrote a book about the issue. Apparently, Daschle made it clear he would only accept the Cabinet position if Obama also named him the administration's point man to develop a health care plan. "Being a Cabinet secretary is a car and driver and you get to go to the head of the line at the airport, unless you're Defense or State," a Daschle associate tells the WP. "This was key for Tom to have that White House connection." In other transition news, Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona appears to be Obama's choice to become homeland security secretary.
Daschle's selection not only provides another example of how Obama is filling his administration with Washington veterans, but also promises to test his strict ethics rules. Daschle's wife is a registered lobbyist whose list of clients might provide conflicts of interest for her husband, but her focus is in the aerospace and military industries. And, as the NYT details in a piece inside, Daschle himself is also open to examination. Since leaving the Senate, Daschle has been a board member of the Mayo Clinic as well as an adviser to a law and lobbying firm. Although this might not prevent his appointment, Daschle might have to recuse himself from issues that relate to his former employers, "a potentially broad swatch of the health secretary's portfolio," says the NYT, which notes the lobbying firm has dozens of health care industry clients, including pharmaceutical companies and health care providers.
The LAT fronts an interesting interview with a senior officer, "Zimbabwe's version of the KGB: the Central Intelligence Organization." The meeting between journalist and spy, which was carried out in the utmost secrecy, reveals how a group of people who could once be counted on to be the most loyal to the president have become disenchanted. The senior officer estimates that 60 percent to 70 percent of CIO officers no longer back President Robert Mugabe. "That the dark heart of Mugabe's web of fear is abandoning him underscores how tenuous his grip on power has become," writes the LAT's Robyn Dixon.
In the WP's op-ed page, Slate founder Michael Kinsley writes that Americans may have just elected a president who is part of the one group that suffers from socially sanctioned discrimination in the United States: smokers. Although Obama claims to have quit smoking, "the evidence is ambiguous." Regardless, if he hasn't quit, "we should forgive him" because his "good habits outweigh his single bad one." And perhaps his failure to quit is part of the reason why he's been able to maintain his now-famous calm demeanor. "If he needs an occasional cigarette to preserve it," writes Kinsley, "let's hand him an ashtray, offer him a light and look the other way."
Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2205096/
Krugman on Auto Bridge Failure: You’re putting millions of jobs at risk!
By: Scarecrow Wednesday November 19, 2008 7:10 pm
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Many grappling with golden year disappointments as nest eggs dwindle
It was so close. And then, it wasn’t.
Fifty-year-old Eddie Whitlock thought he was closing in on his hard-earned golden years. According to his master plan, in just five short years he’d retire from his job as executive director for Mental Health America of Northeast Georgia. Then he’d turn his attention to the important things: golf, travel and finally writing that novel.
But this fall, after months of watching his 401(k) dwindle and his stock earnings sink, he accepted his new retirement reality: His golden years would be delayed another 10. If they ever came at all.
“I really think I’ll be working until I die,” says Whitlock, who lives in Athens, Ga. “I’ll be at work till the day they carry me out on a stretcher with a coroner’s tag tied to my big toe.”
One of the biggest worries for those on the brink of retirement used to be how to fill all that spare time. But as the economic meltdown devastates the savings of millions of Americans, a rising number of older workers are now realizing that retirement instead will have to come much later than they'd planned — if at all. And some of those who had only just to begun to enjoy their leisure years are now having to tuck aside their dreams and, in some cases, their pride, to return to the workforce.
For many, feelings of hopelessness, despair, anger and shame have darkened what until very recently they'd banked on being a new beginning.
“It's a real sense of shock,” says Phyllis Moen, a University of Minnesota sociologist who studies adjustment to retirement. “Here they thought they were in control, and they created a life that works — and suddenly, they’ve lost control. I think what's happening is a real upending of expectations of the 50s, 60s and 70s — of what life’s going to be for this group of people.”
Psychologists say those going through this kind of financial crisis may feel a spike in anxiety, panic attacks and depression. And for some, suicide may seem like the only way out. One msnbc.com reader from Cleveland, Ohio wrote " I have contemplated suicide, but my family does not have enough money to bury me.”
During the Great Depression, suicide rates rose from 14 to 17.4 per 100,000 people in 1933, according to the American Association of Suicidology, a nonprofit organization that promotes research and training in suicide prevention.
Psychologists are cautious about saying whether they expect a similar increase during these financial hard times, but seniors are in an age group already at higher risk for suicide: Although adults 65 and older make up just 12 percent of the population, they accounted for 16 percent of suicide deaths in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s going to be a profound sense of loss for some people who had expected to enter their last stage of life and just enjoy it — and now they’re having to go back to work,” says Jennifer Harkstein, a New York City clinical psychologist. “For people who have expected to be retired by 70 or 75, there’s going to be some loss, some grief, that they can’t go and live these years that they’ve planned for.”
For Whitlock, the biggest blow came from the increasingly volatile stock market, as he watched his nonprofit employer’s account lose 25 percent of its value over the last year and a half. When he says he’s too afraid now to even peek at his 401(k), he’s only half joking.
“In the old days, people would be guaranteed an income for life, and they’d have an age at which it was clear they should retire,” says Alicia Munnell, an economist and director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “We’re now shifting to an age of 401(k) plans, which is shifting all the risks and responsibility to the individuals.”
Downsizing dreams
For those who have retired, it’s a matter of downsizing dreams. So far, 63-year-old Edith Durrant’s retirement years haven’t turned out the way she pictured.
“My real dream always was to own a motor home and just travel,” says Durrant, a retired postal service worker who lives in Bellingham, Wash. Because she and her husband, Ben, had saved a modest nest egg, she says, “I didn’t think I would ever have to worry so much about money again.”
But five years ago, Edith Durrant, who is both epileptic and diabetic, had a particularly intense seizure that sent her into a coma for seven days. The cost of her hospital stay, her medications and the year and a half of care it took her to get well again drained everything the couple had saved for their retirement. Still, with her pension and Social Security benefits, they were doing OK — until Ben Durrant was laid off from his job as a sales manager at Office Max in June. Five months later, he’s still looking for work.
“Don’t get me wrong. We eat. We have a roof over our heads. By the look of my belly, it’s not bad,” says Ben Durrant, who’s 59. “But still, there’s the other side of it. You look on the Internet and it talks about these high fashion things and the trips and things like that. You look at them and you wonder — where did mine go? I’m not going to be able to do that. It’s a very sobering thought.”
Adjusting expectations
The Durrants have resigned themselves to their retirement reality, which is what experts recommend: During an economic downturn of this magnitude, it’s time to let go of most golden-year fantasies.
“I mean, I’m of that age. We’ve all had a disappointment,” says economist Munnell, who turns 66 next month. That’s the age she typically recommends that people retire, and she always imagined she’d follow her own advice. Now, she’s buckling down for at least another five years on the job.
“I’m very like everybody else — I felt like we had put aside enough money, but I didn’t plan on a buffer of 20 percent,” she says. Speaking for herself, she says, “The feeling is one of failure, even though it was really very hard to anticipate anything like this. You do feel like you failed.”
For those at or near retirement age, there’s no more time to save. There’s no magic investment to uncover. It’s best to face your 401(k) and lower your expectations — fast, Munnell says.
“You’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt, and play them the best you can,” she says. “Mourn if it’s a serious loss for you, but then, candidly — get over it.”
And then get to work. With the unemployment rate at its highest in more than a decade, those lucky enough to have a job should forget all thoughts of leaving, says Munnell, who co-wrote “Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge,” published earlier this year. “(But) the problem is, it takes two to tango here. Employers have to be willing to hire people or to retain them.”
‘How many no’s can you stand?’
But many of those looking for jobs in their 50s and 60s didn’t plan on leaving their old jobs so soon. Some are pushed into early retirement, or laid off by hemorrhaging industries.
Each day since the day he was laid off from his sales job in June, Ben Durrant has looked for work. But as the days turn into weeks and months, he can feel his self-worth slipping. It doesn’t matter if he’s the best salesman there is, he says. He’s 59 years old. Few places will invest the time and resources into hiring someone that age, who might retire in just a few years, he says.
“In a lot of ways, it’s disheartening,” Durrant says. “How many no’s can you stand? It hurts after a while. It tears away at your self-image and your self-respect. We determine our self-worth out of the job we have. And you’re sitting at home and you’ve got three days worth of whiskers on you and you say, ‘I just want to stay home in my jammies,’ but you can’t.
“It knocks your self-esteem down, but you just have to say, ‘I’m worth this,” and go out and try one more time,” Durrant says.
He’s getting used to the idea that he’ll be making much less money than he was as a manager; he’s now looking at jobs that would pay $10 or $12 an hour. “That’s pretty hard to deal with when you want to go visit the grandkids,” says Durrant.
Finding ways to cope
“For people at the top of their earnings, regardless of their area, when they're offered jobs that are eight or nine dollars an hour, they just can't reconcile that. They think, ‘I'm worth more than that,’” sociologist Moen says. But that was then. Now it’s key to “get away from the idea of what you were, ‘cause you’re not going to get paid what you used to get paid,” she says.
For those facing dire financial problems, take the job you get, Moen says. Think of it as a stop-gap, because “it’s easier to get a job when you have a job,” she says.
And each time a self-loathing idea floats through your brain — Could I have worked harder? Saved more? — squash it.
“The biggest thing to recognize is, yes, you’re in this and yes, you’re going to have to cope, but it isn’t your fault. It’s a public issue,” Moen says. “This is not something you caused. You need to try to weather it, but it’s not your fault.”
If you can get a job, “it will be satisfying in the sense that this is a scary time, because it seems like everything is out of control and no one knows what’s happening, but if you can control something like that, you can say to yourself, ‘Well, I got out and I got a job,’” Munnell says. “Control what you can control.”
In order to gain a little control herself, Munnell has banned herself from watching too much Bloomberg or CNN and obsessing over how far the market dipped today. Other experts suggest squirreling away what little you can — even just $50 extra a week, to experience the magic of watching a savings account that’s slowly growing, to remind yourself that some things are still in your control.
Otherwise, let your family talk you down, take long walks with the dog and keep in mind: No one has this thing under control, experts say.
“We know that life hasn’t handed us a bowl of cherries. We got half a bowl of pits,” Durrant says. “But, dangit, you do what you need to do. You pop your head up the next morning and go on.”
John McCain has two words for Jackson Browne: You're welcome.
That's the gist of a response to Browne's lawsuit that the McCain campaign's sampling of his classic (or, as they put it, "long-ago published") "Running on Empty" implied that the famously lefty singer-songwriter was endorsing the maverick but nevertheless Republican presidential candidate.
And, oh yeah, added in for good measure are we didn't exactly do it and whoever did it is protected by fair use.
"Given the political, non-commercial, public interest and transformative nature of the use of a long-ago published song, the miniscule amount used and the lack of any effect on the market for the song (other than perhaps to increase sales of the song)," reads the memorandum, "these claims are barred by the fair use doctrine."
McCain's national campaign maintains it had nothing to do the 120-second-long commercial, which ran in the battleground state of Ohio, and that it was the sole work of the state's Republican Party. The ad contains 30 seconds of Browne's song in a reference to Barack Obama's suggestion that people inflate their tires to save gas.
Use of the song in an ad would typically require the permission of the rights holder in the form of a synchronization license, but permission was neither sought nor granted. Browne has a rigid policy against his music being used in commercials, according to attorney Larry Iser, which is why he says potential damages could run high.
McCain argues that Browne's stance only "strengthens the fair use argument." Their emphasis. You're welcome!
TMZ has the memorandum, filed on November 17, as a .pdf. A hearing is set for December 8.
South Texas county indicts Cheney, Gonzales
By Alex Lantier 
20 November 2008
A grand jury in southern Texas' Willacy County has indicted US Vice President Dick Cheney and former US attorney general Alberto Gonzales on state charges of misconduct involving private prisons. The indictment, brought by District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra, also names several local officials.
The indictment alleges conflict of interest stemming from an $85 million investment by Cheney in the Vanguard Group, a company that holds shares in private companies running federal detention centers, noting that Cheney had influence over the federal contracts awarded to the prison companies held by the Vanguard Group. The indictment also names Cheney as responsible for "at least misdemeanor assaults" at these prisons. The indictment accuses Gonzales of intervening, as US Attorney General in 2006, to stop an investigation into abuses at private prisons.
As of this writing, the presiding judge has declined to sign the indictment, halting any further action on the case.
Willacy County hosts a series of federal, state and county prisons, some of which are outsourced to private prison companies such as MTC and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut). These prisons have a long history of corruption and misconduct. In 2005 Guerra obtained guilty pleas from three former county commissioners while investigating bribery charges related to MTC's federal prison contracts.
In 2006, a Willacy County jury ordered GEO Group to pay a $47.5 million fine in a civil judgment on a 2001 case, when Wackenhut guards allowed other inmates to beat inmate Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks.
Guerra told the Associated Press the current indictment is a "national issue" and that experts from around the country had testified before the grand jury. The indictment reportedly refers to the de la Rosa case.
The indicted officials brushed off the charges. Agence France-Presse wrote, "Cheney's spokeswoman [Megan Mitchell] declined to comment because his office had not yet received a copy of the indictment." Mitchell arrogantly added, "Let's wait and see if we even receive one."
Gonzales' attorney George Terwilliger III said, "This is obviously a bogus charge on its face, as any good prosecutor can recognize," adding that he hoped Texas authorities would stop "this abuse of the criminal justice system."
Michael Cowen--the attorney for State Senator Eddie Lucio, who is also named in the indictment--issued a statement declaring, "It is a shame that Guerra has chosen to dedicate his energy to fighting with his fellow public servants, rather than actually prosecuting criminals." In a revealing comment, Cowen added that Guerra dismissed so many cases that local officials disparagingly called him "The Great Emancipator"--a common name of respect for President Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves after the US Civil War. Cowen added that his office was planning to file a motion to quash the indictment.
The pose of incredulity and aggrieved innocence struck by Cheney and Gonzales reeks of hypocrisy and bad faith. Far from clearing them, their record as members of the Bush administration suggests that accusations of misconduct directed against them deserve due consideration.
Cheney is hated in the US and around the world for framing and executing the Bush administration's policy of aggressive war, most notably in Iraq, in flagrant violation of international law. His longstanding policy is to shield himself from public oversight, notably evading Congressional attempts to obtain records of his 2001 Energy Task Force meetings on Iraq with the grotesque claim that his office is not part of the executive branch.
As for Gonzales, he resigned as Attorney General in disgrace last year, after refusing to answer Congressional inquiries into the Department of Justice's improper firings of US attorneys. As White House counsel during the first Bush administration, he played a key role in promoting the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program and helped draft legal memoranda arguing that the Geneva Convention's provisions were "quaint" and need not be applied to Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners. Gonzales also requested the "torture memo" that defined torture so narrowly as to permit US forces to use abusive interrogation methods banned by US and international law.
District Attorney Guerra, on the other hand, has been the continuing target of a campaign of official harassment, facing bogus charges of extorting money from a bail bond company and using his office for personal business.
In March 2007 Guerra was jailed during a grand jury investigation of these charges. Two special prosecutors were appointed in the investigation: former US attorney Mervyn Mosbacker and Gus Garza, who ran against and lost to Guerra for the position of District Attorney in 1992. Since 1996, notes the Harlingen, Texas Valley Morning Star, "Guerra has won three elections, largely drawing support from working-class residents." However, Guerra lost the 2008 Democratic primary elections.
An appeals court later ruled that the special prosecutors were improperly appointed to investigate Guerra, and last month Judge Manuel Banales dismissed the indictments altogether.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Officials: Obama Considering Robert Kennedy For Top Environmental Post
Three huge, immediate reasons to be happy about last night
There are all sorts of reasons to view last night's events as an extremely positive development, including the fact that it was a truly crushing repudiation of the right-wing faction that has dominated the Republican Party for the last two decades. The GOP is very close to being nothing more than a broken regional party, confined almost entirely to the Deep South and a few small, scattered states in the Midwest, and entirely uncompetitive in huge swaths of the country. All of that merits, and will undoubtedly receive, lavish analytical attention (and celebration) over the next few days and weeks.
But for the moment, here are three extremely clear, indescribably significant reasons why last night was important:
Court watchers almost unanimously believe that those first two Justices -- John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- are certain to leave the court at some point over the next four years, while the third -- David Souter -- is highly likely to do so. To understand why that matters so much, just consider that all three of those justices were in very precarious, narrow majorities in crucial decisions such as these:
Boumediene v. Bush (2007): Invalidating Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act as unconstitutional because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus and because the kangaroo Guantanamo process designed by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and approved by Congress was a constitutionally inadequate substitute.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006): Declaring Guantanamo military tribunals to be both unconstitutional and illegal because the President lacked the inherent constitutional authority under Article II to order them and because they violated the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3, the protections of which apply to all detainees.
Lawrence v. Texas (2003): Striking down a Texas statute criminalizing same-sex sodomy as a violation of the Due Process Clause and overturning Bowers v. Hardwick, decided only 17 years earlier, which upheld such statutes.
Had McCain won last night, it is virtually certain that at least two -- and probably all three -- of the above-listed Justices would have been replaced by those who would have decided those cases the other way, ensuring the opposite result. It is also quite likely that a McCain victory would have meant the end of Griswold, Roe and their privacy-protecting progeny, which is now likely to be preserved for decades to come.
With numerous cases likely to be decided by the Supreme Court in the next several years that linger from the years of Bush radicalism -- involving truly vital questions of executive power and core individual liberty -- a McCain/Palin victory would have been, for this reason alone, a genuine disaster, possibly a final nail in the coffin of our constitutional framework. Now, the Court majority which decided these landmark cases of the past several years, imposed some limits on the presidency, and upheld those core rights in the face of a true onslaught will be revitalized and strengthened, and will ensure that the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas faction remains, in most matters, an impotent minority for many years to come, if not decades.
George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr -- a leading apologist for many (though not all) of the lawless and radical Bush policies of the last eight years -- last night smugly predicted that Democrats who spent the last eight years opposing executive power expansions and an oversight-free Presidency will now reverse positions, while Republicans who have been vehement advocates of a strong executive and opposed to meaningful Congressional oversight will do the same. I have no doubt that he's right to some extent -- some Obama supporters will become overnight believers in the virtues of a strong executive, defend everything he does, and will resent "intrusions" into his power, while huge numbers of Republicans will, just as quickly, suddenly re-discover their alleged belief in checks and balances and a limited federal government.
But I genuinely expect that those who have made the restoration of our Constitutional framework and preservation of core liberties a top priority over the last eight years will continue to pursue those goals with equal vigor, regardless of the change of party control. And few things are more important in that effort than having a Supreme Court majority that at least minimally safeguards those principles. It's hard to overstate the importance of last night's election outcome in ensuring a reasonably favorable Court majority and, even more so, in averting what would have been a real disaster for our basic rights and system of government had John McCain been able to replace those three Justices with GOP-approved nominees. By itself, maintaining the Court more or less as is won't reverse any of the Constitutional erosions of the last eight years, but it is an absolute prerequisite to doing so.
On January 20, With the Stroke of a Pen, President Obama Can Undo Some of the Damage of the Past Eight Years
President-elect Barack Obama will become chief executive of a nation that has been greatly weakened -- in particular, our freedoms, our values, and our international reputation have been significantly undermined by the policies of the past eight years. Presidents have enormous power not only to set the legislative agenda, but also to establish policy by executive order, federal regulation, or simply by refocusing the efforts and emphases of the executive agencies. President-elect Obama must use all of these tools to restore our freedoms and move the country forward.
In preparation for the transition to a new presidential administration next year, I asked my staff to look at what a new president could do to begin to reverse the damage that has been done in the past eight years to this great nation. What I got back -- from experts on a wide variety of subjects from throughout the ACLU -- was very revealing. And it brought home just how off-track our presidential campaigns have become.
As you can see here, some of the items were self evident for us: stop torture, close Guantanamo, shut down the military commissions, end "extraordinary renditions" in which suspects are kidnapped by the CIA and sent to countries where they are tortured. All of these practices are abominations -- violations of our nation's dearest principles and a blotch on America's good name. Those are actions the next president, whoever he turns out to be, should take on his first day in office.
Our other priorities are nearly as clear: steps such as ending warrantless spying on Americans, fixing the nation's broken watch list system, banning discrimination against sexual minorities in federal employment, stopping the monitoring of peaceful political activists, and restoring the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division as a meaningful body.
But what is really striking is when you move down to the next level. I received dozens and dozens of action items from throughout our broad, multi-issue organization -- issues that are never going to make the front page of the newspaper, but which can have a dramatic effect on the lives of Americans.
Let me give you just one example. Until recently, residents of public housing were to be evicted from their homes whenever criminal activity took place in those units -- without exception. But one result of this "get tough" law was that women who were victims of domestic violence were being evicted from their units because of the crime that took place there -- the domestic violence -- even though they were the victim of the crime!
Congress fixed this absurdity in the 2005 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). But today, more than two years after enactment, the Bush Administration has still not acted to implement the fix. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has not issued regulations interpreting and explaining the law, and has distributed inaccurate information about how it applies. As a result, many public housing authorities remain unaware of the new law and have not trained their staff on the new protections.
It's a fair bet you're never going to see that issue raised in a presidential debate, or read about it on a bumper sticker, or on the front page of your newspaper. Probably not in the back pages either. I worry that even the "big" issues like closing Guantánamo, shutting down the military commissions, and prohibiting torture and rendition will literally be thrown under the bus in a new administration. As I read over the list of requests our staff has compiled, it is striking how many issues are like this -- vital, important issues that affect many lives, but which we have a dim hope of ever setting directly before the American people.
The country's civil liberties "to do" list really brings home just how sweeping the power of the president of the United States is. The often obscure actions of various deputy assistant secretaries will together probably make as much difference to Americans as the new president's actions on the headline issues of our times. We need leadership at the top. And President Obama ought to act swiftly on day one by picking up his pen and signing executive orders that shut down Guantánamo and the military commissions and ban torture and rendition. Once he crosses those off of his "to do" list, we can pick up on the many other things that need to get done. But leadership needs to start on day one.
