Intelligence Veterans Back Probe of Bush Era Torture

Intelligence Veterans Back Probe of Bush Era Torture
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Five former CIA officers established Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003, when we saw our profession being corrupted to justify an attack on Iraq. Since then, our numbers have grown to 70 intelligence professionals, mostly retired, who have served in virtually all U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies.

In our first Memorandum for the President (George W. Bush), dated February 5, 2002, we provided a same-day commentary on Colin Powell’s U.N. speech. We warned the president that “an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future [and that] far from eliminating the [terrorist] threat, it would enhance it exponentially.”

We strongly urged the former president to widen the discussion on Iraq “beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” VIPS’ second pre-war Memorandum for the President was titled, “Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem” — a reference to the bogus intelligence we saw being ginned up to “justify” war.

President Bush ignored our warning and the warnings of other informed individuals and groups. The corporate media uncritically echoed the Bush administration’s misuse and misrepresentation of the intelligence, despite the questions raised — including those raised by our unique movement.

(It was the first time an alumni group of intelligence officials had formed expressly to chronicle and to halt the corruption of intelligence.)

The cheerleading for war had begun — a war that would fit the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal’s description of a “war of aggression.” Nuremberg defined such a war as “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Torture: An Accumulated Evil

Torture is one of those accumulated evils. Violating domestic laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is another.

You were right to unceremoniously jettison former CIA director Michael Hayden, who betrayed the thousands of NSA professionals who, until he directed that domestic law could be ignored, had adhered scrupulously to the 1978 FISA law as NSA’s “First Commandment” — Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.

In contrast, we believe you were badly misguided in giving a prominent White House post to former CIA director George Tenet’s protégé John Brennan, who has publicly defended “extraordinary rendition” in full knowledge that its purpose was torture.

Brennan also had complicit knowledge of the lengths to which Tenet conspired with the Department of Justice to distort history and the law in drafting opinions that attempted to “justify” torture.

With all due respect, Mr. President, it would be another mistake for you to believe what you are hearing from the likes of Brennan and Hayden and the journalists they have fed and domesticated.

Please do not be deceived into thinking that most intelligence officials, past and present, condone torture — still less that they are angry that you have put a stop to such techniques.

We are referring, of course, to what President Bush called “an alternative set of procedures” involving cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that violates domestic and international law.

We focus on torture in the VIPS statement that follows these introductory remarks.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recently concluded that it was President Bush himself who, by Executive Memorandum of February 7, 2002 exempting al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Geneva protections, “opened the door” to the abuse that ensued.

You need to know that the vast majority of intelligence professionals deplore “extraordinary rendition” and the other torture procedures that were subsequently ordered by senior Bush administration officials.

Sadly, President Bush was not the first chief executive to find a small cabal of superpatriots, amateur thugs, and contractors to do his administration’s bidding. But never before in this country were lawless thugs given such free rein. The congressional “oversight” committees looked the other way.

Tenet and his acolytes successfully ingratiated themselves with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the faux lawyers who devised what actually amounts to a very porous “legal” shield for those who carried out the torture.

It was a shield designed for and applied exclusively to those “just following orders” at the CIA black sites, and not for the low-ranking soldiers doing similar things at Abu Ghraib.

Some of the latter have done time in prison; one is still there. It would appear that some are less equal than others. And, to this day, the organizers and apologists for torture have managed to escape the consequences of their actions.

No doubt you appreciate better than anyone that the official Department of Justice memoranda you insisted be released last week are a national disgrace. Worse still are the first-hand accounts by young soldiers at Guantanamo of perversions like “rape by instrumentality.”

You should be aware that this was a practice adamantly defended by former White House lawyers when Congress attempted to draft legislation expressly prohibiting it.

Asked to explain their objection, Bush administration lawyers acknowledged that they were worried that such legislation might subject practitioners to prosecution under state and federal criminal statutes.

The Morale Myth

Finally, we want to address the self-serving myth being propagated by Brennan, Hayden, and others to the effect that exposing torture and other abuses would damage morale at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

You may recall that Hayden, while still CIA director, was already going around town telling folks he had warned you “personally and forcefully” that if you authorize an investigation into controversial activities like waterboarding, “no one in Langley will ever take a risk again.”

Hayden was blowing smoke, as we say in the trade, but also gravely insulting all those who have served, and continue to serve, with honor. You need no help from us in interpreting Hayden’s outrageous threat. But the red herring about damage to agency morale does need to be addressed.

On April 28, former Vice President Walter Mondale exposed the speciousness of that argument during an interview in Minneapolis. Mondale was one of the senators on the Church Committee, which during the mid-Seventies unearthed the unlawful activities of COINTELPRO and other abuses by intelligence agencies.

Speaking from that experience, Mondale noted that concern over the effect on agency morale — a concern that is widely expressed now — was also voiced both before the Church investigation got under way and while it was proceeding.

The concern proved totally unfounded, according to Mondale, as it quickly became apparent that agency personnel called before the Church Committee were thankful for the chance to get the truth out, get a heavy burden off their shoulders, and put the scandal behind them.

Most important, the truth that was brought to light made it possible for the country to resolve how national security issues should be addressed in the future. Much of that wisdom and many of the legal protections introduced at that time were simply disregarded by your predecessor and the people he picked to run his administration.

As for the need for holding people to account, Mondale had this to say:

"Holding people responsible in some way for what happened is very important. If the verdict here is that you can do these kinds of things and there are no consequences, then that leaves a precedent. I've been around the federal government long enough to know that if there is a bad precedent, it's like leaving a loaded pistol on the kitchen table. You don't know who is going to pick it up and pull the trigger. There need to be consequences for violating the law.”

* * *
Statement of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity on Torture
Interrogation Abuses and Those Responsible Must Be Fully Exposed

Inasmuch as we have gone on record as strongly opposed to torture, both on moral and practical grounds, from the first public awareness that the Bush administration had decided to violate international and domestic law, treaty provisions, and American tradition;

As former intelligence officials we understand that unless intelligence is “actionable” — accurate, specific, and timely enough to be acted upon with some confidence — it is ineffective.

Equally important, we acknowledge our responsibility to expose fallacious reasoning regarding the utility of torture in acquiring actionable intelligence. This issue comes to the fore especially in the celebrated, but specious “ticking time-bomb hypothetical”—a regular feature of Jack Bauer TV fiction.

The fact that the exploits of Jack Bauer have injected a dangerous level of fiction and fear among impressionable viewers, and have misled not only interrogators at Guantanamo but also the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes — not to mention Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — leaves no doubt that such illusionary scenarios need to be addressed by professionals with real-life experience.

Inasmuch as the recently released legal memos that comprised part of the “golden shield” constructed by Bush Administration lawyers do shed some light but also provide inadequate information on “harsh interrogation tactics,” and that the memos sow confusion regarding which officials were responsible for institutionalizing those methods — not to mention whether they were actually effective, as former Vice President Cheney continues to insist;

Inasmuch as it has come to light that two detainees were waterboarded at least 266 times, throwing strong doubt on various rationalizations regarding the effectiveness of waterboarding in providing timely actionable intelligence (in a “ticking time-bomb” scenario, for example);

Whereas CIA Director Leon Panetta has insisted that the “harsh interrogation tactics that some officials have declared to be torture” (the circumlocution now in vogue in the corporate media) might again be used in a future “ticking time-bomb hypothetical;”

Whereas, when the torture technique of waterboarding, a practice with antecedents in the Spanish Inquisition, was applied by Japanese troops in WWII to American and British prisoners — Japanese officers were later tried and executed;

Whereas there has been no better system devised — despite some shortcomings — to ascertain the truth of potential wrongdoing than the criminal investigative and judicial adversary process, which provides the right to attorney and right to jury and is governed by judicial rules which attempt to ensure fairness;

Whereas we recognize that the criminal justice process serves the important goal of stopping and deterring criminal actions and cannot be dismissed as merely “retribution;”

Whereas 92 videotapes showing application and results of the “harsh interrogation tactics that some officials have declared to be torture” have already been destroyed, and there is understandable concern that other evidence is being destroyed as the days go by;

Whereas other civilian and military intelligence professionals have also gone on record (see Annex below) with respect to how torture tactics are not only ineffective in terms of getting reliable, actionable intelligence but have fueled recruitment by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to the point that, arguably, more U.S. troops have been killed by terrorists bent on revenge for torture than the 3,000 civilians killed on 9/11;

Whereas the false confessions that were elicited by the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, were used by the president, vice president, and the secretary of state (at the U.N.) to claim that proof existed of operational ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and whereas such false confessions also diverted limited investigative resources to pursue bogus leads;

We of VIPS call for a full, truthful and public fact-finding process to begin without delay. We ask that you give careful consideration to Senator Carl Levin’s suggestion that the attorney general appoint retired judges with solid reputations for integrity to begin the process.

Another viable possibility would be the appointment of an independent “blue-ribbon commission,” perhaps modeled on the Church Committee of the mid-Seventies, to assess any illegal or improper activities and make recommendations for reform in government operations against terrorism.

We commend the administration for releasing the Department of Justice memos attempting to legalize torture. We believe the remaining relevant information must be released promptly so that the citizenry can make informed judgments about what was done in our name and, if warranted, an independent prosecutor can be appointed without unnecessary delay.

We believe strongly that any judgments regarding amnesty, forgiveness or pardon can only be made on the basis of a fully developed, public record — and not used as some sort of political bargaining chip.

Finally, we firmly oppose the notion that anyone can arrogate a right to ignore the Nuremberg Tribunal’s rejection of “only-following-orders” as an acceptable defense.

(signatories are listed alphabetically with former intelligence affiliations)

Gene Betit, US Army, DIA, Arlington, VA
Ray Close, National Clandestine Service (CIA), Princeton, NJ
Phil Giraldi, National Clandestine Service (CIA), Purcellville, VA
Larry Johnson, CIA & Department of State, Bethesda, MD
Pat Lang, US Army (Special Forces), DIA, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council, Linden, VA
Tom Maertens, Department of State, Mankato, MN
Ray McGovern, US Army, CIA, Arlington, VA
Sam Provance, US Army (Abu Ghraib), Greenville, SC
Coleen Rowley, FBI, Apple Valley, MN
Greg Thielmann, Department of State & Senate Intel. Committee staff, Arlington, VA
Ann Wright, US Army, Department of State, Honolulu, HI

Annex

We list below additional experienced intelligence personnel and a few others, who have spoken out/written publicly about the inefficacy and counter productiveness of torture:

FBI: Ali Soufan, Dan Coleman, Jack Cloonan

CIA: John Helgerson (former Inspector General), Bob Baer, Haviland Smith, Mel Goodman

The Public Health-Care Option is Freedom

The Public Health-Care Option is Freedom
by Dean Baker

Back in the good old days, the conservatives were the folks who favoured individual choice. Not any more. In the current healthcare debate, the top priority of the so-called conservatives is to deny people choice. They want to make sure that Americans do not have the option to buy into a Medicare-type public healthcare plan. These alleged conservatives have come up with a variety of arguments against allowing people the Medicare-type option, but the only one that makes sense is that they work for the insurance industry.

The argument against a Medicare-type option always begins with the assertion that the government can't do anything. This is a peculiar claim given the popularity of Medicare, but it also makes no sense as an argument against giving people a buy-in option. Suppose the government gives people the option to buy into its really bad plan. Everyone would just stick with the good private plans we have now, right?

The so-called conservatives then tell us that people will end up buying into the bad Medicare-type plan instead of the good private insurance options because the government will subsidise the Medicare-type plan. A little bit of arithmetic is sufficient to dismiss this argument.

How much money would be needed to get people to choose a bad healthcare plan rather than a good one? This would have to involve some serious subsidies. People are not going to sacrifice their health and the health of their families for another cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Suppose it took a subsidy of $1,000 a year to get people to choose the bad Medicare-type plan over the good private sector plans. With a non-Medicare population of more than 250 million, this would imply government subsidies of more than $250bn a year, if the Medicare-type plan was to fully replace private sector plans, as the so-called conservatives warn.

Is it really plausible that Congress will approve $250bn a year in subsidies ($2.5tn over a 10-year budget window) for a Medicare-type plan that everyone thinks is awful? Is there another altogether wasteful programmes that gets public subsidies even one-tenth of this size?

This one just doesn't pass the laugh test. If conservative politicians don't think they can prevent such an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars being perpetuated year after year for the indefinite future, they should probably consider another line of work.

In short, there is no genuine conservative argument against allowing people the option of buying into a Medicare-type plan. If the plan proves to be inferior to private insurance plans, as is often argued, then the consequences will be relatively minor. Some number of people who choose to sign up with this plan will find that they don't like it, and then will switch to a better alternative. In time, a bad public plan will soon flounder, since few people will buy into it. There may be some effort to provide subsidies to even a bad public plan, but it is not plausible that the subsidies could be large enough to displace private plans.

It is also clear that the opposition to a Medicare-type public plan does not stem from townhall-type mass opposition. A recent New York Times poll found that by an overwhelming majority, 65% to 26%, the public favours giving people this option. If there is a member of Congress that risks defeat by supporting a public plan, it is not because of their constituents' views.

The opposition to a Medicare-type option is not based on public sentiment or the fear that the plan will be bad. Rather the opposition is based on the fear that the plan will be good and that people will choose to buy into it. This will cost the insurance industry tens of billions of dollars in profit over the next decade and could mean the end of big paycheques for the industry's CEO's and other high-level executives.

But the people who oppose giving the public the opportunity to buy into a Medicare-type plan should not be called conservatives. Honest conservatives would have no objection to giving the public a choice. The people who oppose a Medicare-type plan are doing the bidding of the insurance industry - there is no conservative principle at stake. And we all know what Joe Wilson has to say about people like that.

Where is the Defund Blackwater Act

Where is the Defund Blackwater Act By Jeremy Scahill

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."


The legislation applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or others affiliated with a group charged with any of the above.

According to the Project on Oversight and Government Reform, this legislation could potentially eliminate a virtual Who's Who of defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and KBR and other corporations like AT&T, FedEx and Dell.

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is being attacked. Yet the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company, which is headed by Erik Prince. Prince was a major donor to Republican causes and campaigns, including those of some of the Defund ACORN bill's sponsors, like Indiana Republican Mike Pence, one of the key figures hunting down Van Jones. A former employee recently described Prince as a man who "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe" and said that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Blackwater has a $217 million security contract through the State Department in Iraq--a contract just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. It also holds a $210 million State Department "security" contract in Afghanistan, running through 2011 and another multimillion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for "training" in Kabul. This is on top of Blackwater's clandestine work for the CIA, including continuing work on the drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This also does not take into account Blackwater's lucrative domestic work training law enforcement and military forces in the United States at the company's compounds in North Carolina, California and Illinois, nor the private "security" work it does for entities like the International Republican Institute, nor the work it does in training "faith-based organizations." Nor does it include the contracts doled out to Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, which works for foreign governments and Fortune 500 corporations.

Then there is this fact: Blackwater was paid more than $73 million for federally funded, no-bid security contracts with the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, billing taxpayers $950 per man per day, a spending decision the Bush administration called "the best value to the government." In the wake of the hurricane ACORN, meanwhile, only helped poor people who were suffering as a result of the government's total failure to respond.

A recent federal audit of Blackwater, compiled by the State Department and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, suggests the company may have to repay some $55 million to the government for allegedly failing to meet the terms of just one federal contract in Iraq--which, it is important to note, is $2 million more than the total amount allotted by the government to ACORN over the past fifteen years. (The company also cannot account for one federally funded "deep fat fryer" in Iraq, according to the audit.)

Since 2003 Blackwater has raked in well over $1 billion in security contracts alone--all of which were kicked off by a no-bid contract to guard former Coalitional Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer. Let's also remember that Blackwater was estimated in Congressional hearings in 2007 to earn some 90 percent of its revenue from the government. Prince refused to disclose his salary but said it was more than $1 million. Blackwater has been or is being investigated by Congress, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department and the IRS, among other agencies, for a range of issues from arms smuggling to manslaughter to tax evasion. One of its operatives pleaded guilty to killing an innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilian, while five others have been indicted on manslaughter and other charges stemming from the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which seventeen Iraqi civilians were gunned down. The company is also facing a slew of civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings in Iraq.

Here is a question for the Democratic lawmakers that voted in support of the Defund ACORN Act: how do you justify making this a major league legislative priority while Blackwater continues to be armed and dangerous around the globe on the US government payroll? Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

The NYT David Brooks shameful war record should discredit him for life. Why does the opposite happen?

The NYT David Brooks shameful war record should discredit him for life. Why does the opposite happen? by Glenn Greewald

In today's New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places." Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path." Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: "all out or all in." The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Needless to say, Brooks was writing all the same things in late 2002 and early 2003 about Iraq -- though, back then, he did so from the pages of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard. When I went back to read some of that this morning, I was -- as always -- struck by how extreme and noxious it all was: the snide, hubristic superiority combined with absolute wrongness about everything. What people like David Brooks were saying back then was so severe -- so severely wrong, pompous, blind, warmongering and, as it turns out, destructive -- that no matter how many times one reviews the record of the leading opinion-makers of that era, one will never be inured to how poisonous they are.

All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all. They're doing the same things now that they did then. When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third. Ponder that for a minute.

Just read some of what Brooks wrote about Iraq. It's absolutely astounding that someone with this record doesn't refrain from prancing around as a war expert for the rest of their lives. In fact, in a society where honor and integrity were valued just a minimal amount, a record like this would likely cause any decent and honorable person, wallowing in shame, to seriously contemplate throwing themselves off a bridge:

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003:

I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. . . . Then they brought on a single "expert" to analyze Powell's presentation. This fellow, who looked to be about 25 and quite pleased with himself, was completely dismissive. The Powell presentation was a mere TV show, he sniffed. It's impossible to trust any of the intelligence data Powell presented because the CIA is notorious for lying and manipulation. The presenter showed a photograph of a weapons plant, and then the same site after it had been sanitized and the soil scraped. The expert was unimpressed: The Americans could simply have lied about the dates when the pictures were taken. Maybe the clean site is actually the earlier picture, he said.

That was depressing enough. Then there were a series of interviews with French politicians of the left and right. They were worse. At least the TV expert had acknowledged that Powell did present some evidence, even if he thought it was fabricated. The politicians responded to Powell's address as if it had never taken place. They simply ignored what Powell said and repeated that there is no evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that, in any case, the inspection system is effective.

This was not a response. It was simple obliviousness, a powerful unwillingness to confront the question honestly. This made the politicians seem impervious to argument, reason, evidence, or anything else. Maybe in the bowels of the French elite there are people rethinking their nation's position, but there was no hint of it on the evening news.

Which made me think that maybe we are being ethnocentric. As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding.

But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. . . . Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. . . . Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 7, 2003:

I do suspect that the decision to pursue this confrontational course emerges from Bush's own nature. He is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars. Bush wants them to do it in public, where history can easily judge them. Needless to say, neither the French nor the Russians nor the Chinese believe that honesty has anything to do with diplomacy. They see the process through an entirely different lens.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, January 29, 2003:

This was speech as autobiography. President Bush once again revealed his character, and demonstrated why so many Americans, whether they agree with this or that policy proposal, basically trust him and feel he shares their values. Most Americans will not follow the details of this or that line in the address. But they will go about their day on Wednesday knowing that whatever comes in the next few months, they have a good leader at the helm.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 21, 2003:

I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002:

In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully . . . The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed. . . . The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists. Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests. Certain people--many people, in fact--are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs. Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision. He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, September 30, 2002:

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .

You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. . . . For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003:

So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await.

Look at that last paragraph. He proclaimed that "events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac." On the eve of the war he cheered on, as he celebrated the fact that "the debate is over" and war was imminent and inevitable, he identically vowed: "Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac." Soon we would know.

Did Brooks ever tell his readers what we found out about that? Did he ever acknowledge that the French -- whose opposition to attacking Iraq and skpeticism about WMD claims he attributed to cowardice, anti-Semitism, paranoia over American deceit, anti-American hatred, bad character, and lack of reason -- turned out to be right and Brooks and friends were miserably wrong? Did he ever retract his smears that the American "peace camp" was driven by hatred, anti-Semitism, and ignorance about Iraq, or acknowledge that his claims about Saddam -- that his ideology "calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time" -- were at least just as applicable to Brooks himself and his own neoconservative movement?

On the fifth anniversary of the attack on Iraq, Greg Mitchell noted that although Brooks "bears special blame -- shame -- not only for his writing, but for serving as senior editor of the most influential pro-war publication, The Weekly Standard," no such acknowledgment -- at least as of May, 2008 -- had ever issued from him. Instead, drinking from the well of the most accountability-free profession (punditry) in the most accountability-free nation for elites, he now just blithely moves on to the next war as though the last one never happened, though this time he's posing as an expert in the pages of The New York Times. Yet again, only he and people like him are strong and courageous enough to confront the towering enemy (by sending other people "outside the wire in dangerous places"). Those opposed to the war or even to escalation are cowards who want to "surrender to the Taliban." And even with the unbroken record he has on Iraq that should shame and discredit him for life (or at least until there's some serious examination, acknowledgment and repentance), he is the second-most influential commentator among "Congressional and political insiders" -- second to one of the very few commentators who did more to bring about that war than Brooks himself did. What type of nation do you think we will be if "insiders" have their views most shaped by people with the record of David Brooks and Tom Friedman?

Former Insurance Executive Lobbyists Make Empty Promises For Reform, Instead Trust CEOs Under Oath

Former Insurance Executive Lobbyists Make Empty Promises For Reform, Instead Trust CEOs Under Oath

NOTE: This is the fourth installment of our series — Meet Your Insurance Company Executive: An Interview with Wendell Potter.

Last week, ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about how insurance companies deceive the public with vague promises of “being at the table” for reform. Earlier this year, Karen Ignagni, the chief lobbyist and leader for AHIP, the trade group representing the health insurance industry, came to the White House and pledged to President Obama, “You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass healthcare reform this year.” This trope, repeated by other representatives for the insurance industry, achieved the goal of persuading many that this year would be “different” for reform and that insurers would not torpedo legislation like in previous efforts. But as Potter notes, lobbyists and public relations professionals like Ignagni can make broad promises without ever being accountable. Individual insurance companies are not on board with what Ignagni is selling:

– AHIP says the industry will end the immoral practice of rescinding coverage of sick customers. But when asked this summer — under oath — by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) if they would “commit” to stopping this practice, executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint all refused.

– AHIP says the health insurance industry is fully supportive of the idea of covering everybody, regardless of medical condition. However, in conference call with investors last month, Aetna CEO Ron Williams bluntly stated that he would pursue profits rather than add or keep enrollment. “We have a clear bias toward profitability over growth,” said Williams.

Potter continues by arguing that the public should be examining the business practices of insurers, not blindly accepting the promises of lobbyists:

POTTER: But if those companies are under oath, three different companies, including one of the largest in the land, that they will continue those, that’s who you should believe. That’s what will be the policy going forward. The trade association doesn’t have power to change practices of the insurance industry at the insurance company level. It can’t change a business model or a way of doing business.

Watch it: video at link.

The friendly, positive statements by Ignagni and her colleagues are part of the “duplicitous” campaign by the insurance industry to charm the public while secretly working to kill and undermine reform. ThinkProgress has documented this campaign and produced this page explaining the insurance industry tactics.
Update Writing for Vanity Fair, Matt Kapp reveals some key stats about health care profiteering:

With median annual compensation of more than $12.4 million, C.E.O.’s at the big health-care companies make two-thirds more than their counterparts in finance and are the highest paid of any industry. The health-care industry’s total annual profit has grown to an estimated $200 billion, and it doled out nearly $170 million in campaign contributions in 2007 and 2008. It now spends more than any other industry lobbying the federal government—$3.5 billion over the past decade and a record $263 million in the first six months of this year.

Could ACORN defunding bill strike military-industrial complex

Could ACORN defunding bill strike military-industrial complex
Overly-broad language used by lawmakers intending to pull government funding for community organizing group ACORN may have the unintended effect of forcing the government to also pull funds from much of the military-industrial complex, a Tuesday report revealed.

"The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to 'any organization' that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things," wrote Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grimm.

"In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops."

Mother Jones was quick to note that could mean any firm in the Project on Government Oversight's contractor misconduct database could be facing a removal of government funds -- including the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide.

Last week the House of Representatives passed a GOP-written bill to defund ACORN by a vote of 345-75. A similar bill cleared the Senate by 83-7.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) praised the result, calling it a victory for a “united Republican effort.” The Associated Press referred to it as a “GOP-led strike.”

However, while the GOP managed to get 173 of its members to vote in favor of the measure, Democrats who crossed over almost made up the majority of the support, with a full 172 voting "aye" alongside the GOP.

A House roll call on the vote is available here.

Sensing a window of opportunity with the GOP's overly-broad language, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is looking to build a list of firms that may also be lumped in with ACORN under the legislation.

"You see, regardless of what you think of ACORN, it is laudable to stop taxpayer money from going to organizations that commit fraud against the government," he said in a statement. "So as per the bill's text, I'm going to put into the Congressional record a list of organizations who have committed fraud against the government or employs anyone who has."

Grayson's list is now online and growing, and he's soliciting the Internet's help to add firms which have committed fraud against the government.

The congressman continued: "Please nominate organizations and show me that they need to be in the record. To help, send me the name of the organization and proof in the form of a link to evidence that this organization should be in the Congressional record. I will also need your email address so I can follow-up with you if necessary. The proof you send needs to be easily verifiable, as in credible media reports, legal documents, government data, or otherwise."

The as-of-yet unverified list reads like a who's who list of the most influential American corporations, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Electric, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, Blackwater Worldwide (now known as Xe Services, LLC), Kellogg Brown & Root, Bank of America, IBM, Halliburton, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard Company, DynCorp International Inc., CACI International, Inc., Dell, Inc., Exxon Mobil and many, many more.

Will Tea Baggers Stand Up for Real Freedom

The Justice Act

Tea Party Expressers who rallied in the capitol last week to protest big government will have another chance to defend "freedom of the individual in this great nation" next week when the Senate Judiciary Committee considers proposed amendments to federal surveillance laws. The Judicious Use of Surveillance in Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act introduced yesterday by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold would limit the virtually unilateral power of law enforcement and national security agencies to conduct surveillance on American citizens, under the Patriot Act and FISA, with no meaningful judicial review. It would also repeal the retroactive immunity granted last year to telecom companies that broke the law by enabling the Bush Administration's warrant-less surveillance program.

Accountability

Hold Ashcroft Accountable

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a "paradigm of prevention," by which the Justice Department would aggressively use federal law to take "suspected terrorists" off the streets. As he later admitted in his book Never Again, however, Ashcroft and those he oversaw had no idea where the next terrorist threat might lie. So the government locked up more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism preventive detention in the first two years after 9/11--not one of whom stands convicted of a terrorist offense today.



Most were locked up using immigration law. But when the government suspected a US citizen, immigration law was no help. So the Ashcroft Justice Department turned to the "material witness" law, which applies to citizens, and twisted it for ends it was never designed to serve--to lock up people "for investigation" even where the government lacked probable cause to believe they had engaged in criminal activity.

Abdullah al-Kidd was one of the many locked up under this law. A US citizen born in Wichita and once a star running back for the University of Idaho, al-Kidd was arrested as a material witness in 2003 and spent more than a year living under strict, parole-like conditions. He was never called to testify in any proceeding. Like many others, he was never charged with criminal conduct. He was a victim of Ashcroft's "paradigm of prevention."

Al-Kidd sued, and in September the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled that Ashcroft could be held personally responsible for this policy. This is a landmark decision for two reasons: it declares a central aspect of Ashcroft's policy clearly illegal, and it insists that accountability extends to those who authorize illegal policies, not just to the foot soldiers who carry them out.

Al-Kidd was subjected to an FBI investigation after 9/11; he was, after all, a Muslim. But the FBI found no evidence that he had engaged in criminal activity...

Rep. Joe ("You Lie") Wilson Authored Bill To Let Illegal Immigrant Stay In U.S.

Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe

"[Right-wing extremists] live in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don't like established facts so they come armed with their own."— Gary Younge

Beltway Priorities and Selective Deficit Disorder

Beltway Priorities and Selective Deficit Disorder

Watching the health care debate unfold these days is a little like watching scenes from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—the ones showing a collage of strung-out, deranged or otherwise incapacitated patients rotting away in a squalid psychiatric ward.

As the insurance industry’s Nurse Ratched lurks in the background, congressional Democrats cower in the corner, fearing the phantom menace of their own shadows. Standing next to the window, suicidal Republican leaders rant about “death panels” and threaten to splatter their electoral prospects onto the pavement below. Nearby, White House officials struggle with multiple-personality ailments as they mumble contradictory statements about the public option. Meanwhile, tea party protesters lie on the floor in the fetal position, soiling their hospital diapers as they throw incoherent tantrums about everything from socialism to communism to czarism to Nazism. And, not surprisingly, Washington reporters just stare off into the distance, having been long ago lobotomized in the wake of their Watergate heyday.

Clearly, the inmates in America’s political sanitarium are each struggling with a different malady. However, they are all suffering from Selective Deficit Disorder—an illness whose symptoms can be particularly difficult to detect.

When we see tea party activists bemoan deficit spending or watch rank-and-file senators like Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., say, “I’m not going to vote for a [health care] bill that’s not deficit-neutral,” it is easy to think these poor souls are perfectly healthy. When President Barack Obama promises to “not sign a [health] plan that adds one dime to our deficit” and then New York Times writers such as David Brooks praise this “dime standard” as the epitome of “pragmatism” and “fiscal sanity,” these victims seem absolutely sane.

Yet, Selective Deficit Disorder is a sickness of omission. Attacking the neural synapses that maintain rudimentary logic, it presents itself not in what its carriers say and do, but in what they refuse to say and do.

Where, for instance, were the conservative protest marchers when President George W. Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Sen. Lincoln’s concern for “deficit neutrality” when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street? Where was Obama’s “dime standard” when he proposed a budget that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where were demands for “fiscal sanity” by Brooks and other right-wing pundits when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were the calls from these supposed “deficit hawks” to raise taxes when they backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists asking such painfully simple questions?

They were nowhere to be seen or heard, because those plagued by Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively worried about deficits.

When it comes to spending on priorities like health care reform that would help ordinary Americans, the illness’ victims scream about deficits and overspending. But when it comes to handing over trillions of dollars to financial firms, defense contractors and other corporate interests, deficits suddenly don’t matter to the disease-addled politicians, protesters and journalists underwritten by those interests.

Luckily, while almost every significant voice in politics is stricken with Selective Deficit Disorder, the majority of the country’s citizens are not. That doesn’t mean Americans love unbalanced budgets, of course. It just means we know there is something very wrong with those who decry deficit spending on health care for millions of people, but ignore far bigger deficit expenditures on giveaways to a tiny handful of fat cats.

Now, all we have to do is stop flying over the cuckoo’s nest and start breaking into the asylum...

* David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations.

Health-care prescription - America needs an outburst of common sense

Health-care prescription - America needs an outburst of common sense

If ever there were a time for comprehensive health care reform, it's now, and yet the forces of darkness are lining up against this urgent need, buttressed by lies, mobs inflamed by those lies and millions of dollars changing hands and changing votes in Washington, D.C.

The idea that doing nothing and going on without changing the way this country's health care is delivered works to the benefit only of the insurance companies, the giant health care providers and the big pharmaceutical companies.

That industry is now pouring $1.4 million A DAY into lobbying — read that buying or renting members of Congress — to water down or delay or preferably kill health care reform and hope it goes away for another 20 years or so.

Part of that high-dollar industry budget is going to the low end of Washington's K Street lobbying corridor, the firms and the folks who specialize in dirty tricks, panicking the uninformed and most vulnerable citizens, financing the creation and spread of lies written, spoken and spread like viruses by robot dialing machines.

The Republican Party, on life support itself, somehow sees an opportunity in encouraging and participating in this flim-flam operation. It ought to, and should, seal the GOP's fate.

Each night for the past week, we've been treated to the sight of mobs screaming and ranting and shouting down town hall meetings where congressional representatives had come to answer their constituents' questions.

No questions got answered. No information got provided. No one left more informed than he or she was when he or she arrived.

That's because they and their organizers were following online playbooks that are telling them where to go, where to sit, how to make it appear as if there are more of them than there are and, above all, to stop the program and allow no discussion of this issue.

They scream that any government-run health care is socialism or Communism. But look at them; look at their gray hair and thickened waists. At least half of them probably depend entirely on Medicare, a government-run program and a damned good one, for their own health care.

They scream that the bills still being written and amended in Congress will deny vital treatments for older Americans and doom them to an early and unnecessary death. Some dare call it euthanasia.

What utter, unadulterated BS.

The only outfits in America that have the right to refuse you treatment for an illness or deny you an organ transplant are the health care corporations, if you're unlucky enough to have to depend on that wonderful private insurance the right wingnuts are so loudly praising and defending.

This is the same wonderful health coverage that's driven hundreds of thousands of American families into bankruptcy because their private insurers refused to pay for urgently needed surgery or cancer treatment, or simply cancelled their coverage.

Why is that?

It's because those same corporations have, in just one decade, driven their profits and overhead (hiring those lobbyists and buying those congressional critters and building their fleets of private jets) from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent.

In other words, the corporate bite has gone from 5 cents of every dollar paid in premiums to 20 cents of every premium dollar.

It's good old unregulated American greed of the same stripe that drove this country into its current economic meltdown. Wall Street loves these guys.

We desperately need a government-run health care program that can, by good old American competition, force private health insurers to get off their pirate ships and back in the real world. The 46 million or so uninsured Americans need somewhere to get their health needs tended. The millions more in dire danger of losing their jobs and their private insurance need some alternative immediately available.

All of us need some people in Congress who haven't been bought or rented by the pirates, liars and thieves to speak out in favor of filling those real needs.

Wonder how much Big Pharma donated to the key committee members who amended the health care legislation to prohibit any government-run health program from negotiating lower drug prices with the price-gouging drug companies of, you guessed it, Big Pharma?

What we need right now is a huge outburst of common sense and enlightened self-interest.

Those gray-haired Medicare recipients who're playing angry mob need to stop screaming and start listening and reading, separating fact from fiction and learning who’s manipulating them and why.

Follow the money trail back to the pirates and thieves and their handmaidens, the greasy liar lobbyists and those in Congress who're slurping at their troughs.

by Joseph L. Galloway

Ayn Rand, Conservatives and social darwinism

Ayn Rand and the American Right

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution--that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous--and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.



The economic right may believe religiously in their moral view of wealth, but we do not have to respect it as we might respect religious faith. For it does not transcend--perhaps no religion should transcend--empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, this conservative view, the Randian inversion of the Marxist worldview, rests upon a series of propositions that can be falsified by data.

Let us begin with the premise that wealth represents a sign of personal virtue--thrift, hard work, and the rest--and poverty the lack thereof. Many Republicans consider the link between income and the work ethic so self-evident that they use the terms "rich" and "hard-working" interchangeably, and likewise "poor" and "lazy." The conservative pundit Dick Morris accuses Obama of "rewarding failure and penalizing hard work" through his tax plan. His comrade Bill O’Reilly complains that progressive taxation benefits "folks who dropped out of school, who are too lazy to hold a job, who smoke reefers 24/7."

A related complaint against redistribution holds that the rich earn their higher pay because of their nonstop devotion to office work--a grueling marathon of meetings and emails that makes the working life of the typical nine-to-five middle-class drone a vacation by comparison. "People just don’t get it. I’m attached to my BlackBerry," complained one Wall Streeter to Sherman. "I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money.”

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich. As the economist Daniel Hamermesh discovered, low-income workers are more likely to work the night shift and more prone to suffering workplace injuries than high-income workers. White-collar workers put in those longer hours because their jobs are not physically exhausting. Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me."

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as "moral luck."

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as "That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!" and "That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!" Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: "Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?"



There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck--all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur--in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent--are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.



In addition to describing the rich as "hard-working," conservatives also have the regular habit of describing them as "productive." Gregory Mankiw describes Obama’s plan to make the tax code more progressive as allowing a person to "lay claim to the wealth of his more productive neighbor." In the same vein, George Will laments that progressive taxes "reduce the role of merit in the allocation of social rewards--merit as markets measure it, in terms of value added to the economy." The assumption here is that one’s income level reflects one’s productivity or contribution to the economy.

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.

If one’s income reflects one’s contribution to society, then why has the distribution of income changed so radically over the last three decades? While we ponder that question, consider a defense of inequality from the perspective of three decades ago. In 1972, Irving Kristol wrote that

Human talents and abilities, as measured, do tend to distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends. . . . This explains one of the most extraordinary (and little-noticed) features of 20th-century societies: how relatively invulnerable the distribution of income is to the efforts of politicians and ideologues to manipulate it. In all the Western nations--the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany--despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution of
income is strikingly similar.

So Kristol thought the bell-shaped distribution of income in the United States, and the similarly shaped distributions among our economic peers, proved that income inequality merely followed the natural inequality of human talent. As it happens, Kristol wrote that passage shortly before a boom in inequality, one that drove the income share of the highest-earning 1 percent of the population from around 8 percent (when he was writing) to 24 percent today, and which stretched the bell curve of the income distribution into a distended sloping curve with a lengthy right tail. At the same time, America has also grown vastly more unequal in comparison with the European countries cited by Kristol.

This suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that the inherent human talent of America’s economic elite has massively increased over the last generation, relative to that of the American middle class and that of the European economic elite. The second is that bargaining power, political power, and other circumstances can effect the distribution of income--which is to say, again, that one’s income level is not a good indicator of a person’s ability, let alone of a person’s social value.

Majority Of Physicians Want Public And Private Insurance Options

Majority Of Physicians Want Public And Private Insurance Options

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

When polled, "nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options," says Dr. Salomeh Keyhani. She and Dr. Alex Federman, both internists and researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, conducted a random survey, by mail and by phone, of 2,130 doctors. They surveyed them from June right up to early September.

Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That's the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they'd like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

Can right-wing conservatives count? My friend's cousin said there were 4 million people there
Yesterday on his radio program, while discussing the crowds at this weekend's 9/12 protests, Glenn Beck claimed that the LondonTelegraph "quote[d] a source from the Park Service, the National Park Service, saying that it is the largest march on Washington ever." This led to a good deal of confusion here, as the Telegraph article contains no such quote. Just another case of Beck making things up? Actually, the story behind this turns out to be much funnier than we could have anticipated.

Several conservative blogs have been quoting National Park Service spokesman "Dan Bana" as saying the 9/12 protest was "the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever." This appears to be a repurposing of this quote from David Barna (who, unlike Dan Bana, appears to be a real person):

David Barna, a Park Service spokesman, said the agency did not conduct its own count. Instead, it will use a Washington Post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the US Capitol grounds, National Mall, and parade route.

"It is a record," Barna said. "We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

Very impressive! Unfortunately, as Little Green Footballs pointed out, that quote was actually about the inauguration:

This is so pathetic I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Dozens - if not hundreds - of right wing blogs are running with this quote, portraying it as a statement about the tea party held last weekend: 'We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.'

The quote is from January. The National Park Service spokesman was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration.

Pam Geller quoted "Dan Bana" as saying this on Saturday. She cited Thomas Lifson at American "Thinker," who also calls him "Dan Bana." In keeping with his fellow conservatives, Lifson doesn't feel the need to provide a link for his outlandish crowd estimates:

Despite mainstream media attempts to characterize turnout as in the thousands, a spokesman for the National Park Service, Dan Bana, is quoted as saying "It is a record.... We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

True, "Dan Bana" definitely "is quoted" as saying this. By whom? Well, Thomas Lifson.

Imaginary ABC News reports, unnamed universities, invented quotes, and for safe keeping, the journalistic equivalent of "I heard this one dude say."

From Pam Geller:

Here's the video over at CSPAN of millions on the mall. Incredible. Look at the pan of the crowd shot. The left fascists are debating the number to take the focus off what happened in Washington, D.C., this weekend. I'll go with the Parks department estimates, thankyouverymuch.

A 9-12 participant in DC claims to have overheard DC police discussing the crowd numbers. They put the numbers at over 2 million -- and those were only the people who could make it into the city. The local authorities as well as many participants claim that many many more could not even get into the city to the core of the protest.

Yes, she cited someone who "claims to have overheard DC police discussing the crowd numbers." Your conservative blogosphere, ladies and gentleman.

Blaming Obama for The Bush Legacy

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

Economists would cite many reasons why presidential terms are an imperfect frame for tracking economic trends. The business cycle doesn't always follow the electoral cycle. A president's economic record is heavily influenced by factors out of his control. Timing matters and so does good fortune.

But few would argue that national economic policy is irrelevant to economic outcomes. And rightly or wrongly, voters still judge presidents and their parties largely by the economy's performance during their watch. In that assessment, few measures do more than the Census data to answer the threshold question of whether a president left the day to day economic conditions of average Americans better than he found it.
If that's the test, today's report shows that Bush flunked on every relevant dimension-and not just because of the severe downturn that began last year.

Consider first the median income. When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That's a decline of 4.2 per cent.

That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The median household income increased during the two terms of Clinton (by 14 per cent, as we'll see in more detail below), Ronald Reagan (8.1 per cent), and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (3.9 per cent). As Mishel notes, although the global recession decidedly deepened the hole-the percentage decline in the median income from 2007 to 2008 is the largest single year fall on record-average families were already worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000, a remarkable result through an entire business expansion. "What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession...working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office," Mishel says.
Bush's record on poverty is equally bleak. When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008.

The trends were comparably daunting for children in poverty. When Clinton left office nearly 11.6 million children lived in poverty, according to the Census. When Bush left office that number had swelled to just under 14.1 million, an increase of more than 21 per cent.

The story is similar again for access to health care. When Clinton left office, the number of uninsured Americans stood at 38.4 million. By the time Bush left office that number had grown to just over 46.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million or 20.6 per cent.

The trends look the same when examining shares of the population that are poor or uninsured, rather than the absolute numbers in those groups. When Clinton left office in 2000 13.7 per cent of Americans were uninsured; when Bush left that number stood at 15.4 per cent. (Under Bush, the share of Americans who received health insurance through their employer declined every year of his presidency-from 64.2 per cent in 2000 to 58.5 per cent in 2008.)

When Clinton left the number of Americans in poverty stood at 11.3 per cent; when Bush left that had increased to 13.2 per cent. The poverty rate for children jumped from 16.2 per cent when Clinton left office to 19 per cent when Bush stepped down.

Every one of those measurements had moved in a positive direction under Clinton. The median income increased from $46,603 when George H.W. Bush left office in 1992 to $52,500 when Clinton left in 2000-an increase of 14 per cent. The number of Americans in poverty declined from 38 million when the elder Bush left office in 1992 to 31.6 million when Clinton stepped down-a decline of 6.4 million or 16.9 per cent. Not since the go-go years of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations during the 1960s, which coincided with the launch of the Great Society, had the number of poor Americans declined as much over two presidential terms.

The number of children in poverty plummeted from 15.3 million when H.W. Bush left office in 1992 to 11.6 million when Clinton stepped down in 2000-a stunning decline of 24 per cent. (That was partly because welfare reform forced single mothers into the workforce at the precise moment they could take advantage of a growing economy. The percentage of female-headed households in poverty stunningly dropped from 39 per cent in 1992 to 28.5 per cent in 2000, still the lowest level for that group the Census has ever recorded. That number has now drifted back up to over 31 per cent.) The number of Americans without health insurance remained essentially stable during Clinton's tenure, declining from 38.6 million when the elder Bush stepped down in 1992 to 38.4 million in 2000.

Looking at the trends by shares of the population, rather than absolute numbers, reinforces the story: The overall poverty rate and the poverty rate among children both declined sharply under Clinton, and the share of Americans without health insurance fell more modestly.

So the summary page on the economic experience of average Americans under the past two presidents would look like this:
Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.

Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.

Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 per cent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 per cent.

Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.
Adding Ronald Reagan's record to the comparison fills in the picture from another angle.

Under Reagan, the median income grew, in contrast to both Bush the younger and Bush the elder. (The median income declined 3.2 per cent during the elder Bush's single term.) When Reagan was done, the median income stood at $47, 614 (again in constant 2008 dollars), 8.1 per cent higher than when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980.

But despite that income growth, both overall and childhood poverty were higher when Reagan rode off into the sunset than when he arrived. The number of poor Americans increased from 29.3 million in 1980 to 31.7 million in 1988, an increase of 8.4 per cent. The number of children in poverty trended up from 11.5 million when Carter left to 12.5 million when Reagan stepped down, a comparable increase of 7.9 per cent. The total share of Americans in poverty didn't change over Reagan's eight years (at 13 per cent), but the share of children in poverty actually increased (from 18.3 to 19.5 per cent) despite the median income gains.
The past rarely settles debates about the future.

The fact that the economy performed significantly better for average families under Clinton than under the elder or younger Bush or Ronald Reagan doesn't conclusively answer how the country should proceed now. Obama isn't replicating the Clinton economic strategy (which increased federal spending in areas like education and research much more modestly, and placed greater emphasis on deficit reduction-to the point of increasing taxes in his first term). Nor has anyone suggested that it would make sense to reprise that approach in today's conditions. But at the least, the wretched two-term record compiled by the younger Bush on income, poverty and access to health care should compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?