Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 109

The eternal wretchedness of Victor Davis Hanson

By Mark Adomanis

As a recovering movement conservative, I have (or would at least like to think I have) a sharp eye for its flaws -- for detecting those instances in which it is simply unable to deal with the truth and thus resorts to prevarication, misdirection, or simple dishonesty.

Victor Davis Hanson is one of the highest profile and most widely-read conservative commentators -- his basic shtick is to compare America's imperial adventure du jour to those of the Greeks or the Romans. There then follows a bunch of very confused historical comparisons that invariably come to the conclusion that the answer to the present difficulty is more military force, more invasions, more bombing, and more "American leadership." Hanson has, as of late, also made a name for himself with hackneyed attacks on Obama's Keynesianism and the generally left-wing, socialist, and nasty way in which the president manages the economy.

But I'm not going to attempt to refute Hanson's entire opus; many other more capable and entertaining writers have already done that. No, what I want to do is to point out a single instance of almost unbelievable factual sloppiness which marred one of his recent posts at National Review. Finally reacting to the riots in Britain, after writing 3 separate blog posts and an article, Hanson wrote:

It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general's Civil Rights Division investigating?). His appeal is perhaps understandable, but many of the themes of rap music — violence against the police, racial chauvinism, and nihilism—may well be some of the cultural catalysts behind the flash violence, though to suggest as much would be seen as more racist than the racist profiling used by the flash beaters. All these incidents are symptomatic of a general breakdown and loss of confidence in Western society. Such urban violence was of course a constant in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America, but now it is deeply embedded within modern sociology and no longer seen quite as criminality.

Now it just so happens that I hail from Philadelphia and that I have actual read a number of articles on the shameful and appalling episodes of "flash mob" violence. If one read Hanson's post and knew nothing else about what has recently transpired, one would inevitably come away with the conclusion that the city's mayor was a weak-willed coward, a milquetoast so bereft of leadership that his only answer to the problem of rampaging youths was to appeal to rappers. In other words, you would think that Michael Nutter was a prime example of the rottenness and corruption of contemporary liberalism, and perfectly emblematic of its failure and of the broader "loss of confidence in Western society."

How surprising, then, to learn that Philadelphia's mayor recently gave a shockingly strong-worded and blunt speech at a traditionally African-American Baptist church in which he said, among other things:

"If you want to act like an idiot, move. Move out of this city. We don't want you here anymore."

"You've damaged yourself, you've damaged another person, you've damaged your peers and, quite honestly, you've damaged your own race. You damaged your own race.

"If you want . . . anybody else to respect you and not be afraid when they see you walking down the street, then leave the innocent people who are walking down the street minding their own damn business. Leave them alone."

"Parents, get your act together. You need to get hold of your kids before we have to."

"A particular problem in the black community is we have too many men making too many babies that they don't want to take care of," he preached to applause. "We end up dealing with your children.

"They're lawless. They act with ignorance. They don't care about anybody else, and their behavior is outrageous. Well, we're not going to tolerate that."

Nutter's speech also criticized black fathers for being nothing more than "sperm donors and ATMs" and was, considering the context, about as hard-hitting and brash as possible (he was in a church after all, so one wouldn't exactly expect him to go on an expletive-filled tirade). At a news conference on Monday, as if to explicitly negate the "root cause" thesis that Hanson so clearly despises, Nutter even went on the record as saying "I don't care what your economic status is in life, you do not have a right to beat someone's ass on the street." Indeed Nutter's speech was so-over-the-top that he actually drew criticism from a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Now I'm not arguing that Nutter is right, nor am I defending (or attacking) his approach. I don't want to get into the argument over what an appropriate response to youth violence is. What I am simply pointing out is that it is 100% factually inaccurate, absolutely and completely wrong, to argue that Michael Nutter is some lily-livered liberal who blames everything on "root causes" and who doesn't see the flash mob violence as criminality. Indeed it's very hard to see how Nutter's speech, in which he spoke positively of the role of religion in his own personal development, demanded that people take responsibility for their own actions, and encouraged fathers to play a positive role in the lives of their children, differs in any way from what a Republican would say in the same situation.

I mean, honestly, if you sat down a bunch of conservative writers, or the Republican version of Aaron Sorkin, and said, "Write a speech about personal responsibility that you would love to hear delivered by the African American mayor of a major east coast city," would it differ in any substantive way from the speech that Nutter actually gave?

It turns out that if you only read Hanson's post you would know less than you knew before reading it. You would come away thinking that the mayor of Philadelphia was a quisling and an idiot. In this way Hanson's commentary, like that of many of his comrades, is negative value added -- you understand less about the world, and have a poorer understanding of objective facts, after you read it than you did before doing so.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively minor error. Hanson has, of course, been just as wrong about much more important issues dozens of time over the past decade. But this little episode is highly suggestive -- Hanson is so sloppy and hackneyed in his writing, so ready to unquestioningly parrot cheap caricatures, that he cannot even recognize when someone is taking his side in an argument. Judging by the basis of what he has said and done, Michael Nutter is just about the worst possible example of the "paralysis" of Western society. That Hanson is incapable of recognizing this says everything you need to know about the extent to which he cares about truth or about informing his readers.

Bank of America death-watch

By Yves Smith

One of the most mesmerizing aspects of the market rout of the last week is the decline in Bank of America's stock price. It fell a stunning 20% yesterday, and even with a strong rebound today, it closed over 22% below its level of two week ago. That puts it well below half of the book value, which is a serious vote of no confidence. An even more troubling sign is that its credit default swaps, which strongly influence the bank's cost of raising new funds in the bond market, have also shown considerable decay.

Yet officials at the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which had an emergency conference call last night, as well as many equity analysts believe that banks in general, and Bank of America in particular, have good liquid reserves and are in a much better position than they were going into the crisis.

So why is Bank of America at risk? The short answer is that it may be insolvent even if it is liquid. Consider two individuals. One makes only $30,000 a year but spends $50,000. He inherited 20 Picassos worth at least $1 million each even in a terrible art market. He has arranged to sell one which he figures will cover his expenses for a very long time. However, the buyer, who pretended to be from a reputable gallery, instead absconds with the painting. Until the owner sells a second painting, he is scrambling for cash. No one doubts that he will be money good, but he is having trouble raising the funds right now.

Consider a second individual. He makes $70,000 a year and his expenses are $60,000. But a friend lent him $500,000 personally to start a business, and that never got off the ground. They have a former written agreement, but the borrower pays no cash interest (his friend is treating the annual interest due as a gift under IRS rules). The note is due in five years but they plan to replace the old loan with a new one if he can't repay, which looks certain.

The lender gets in a financial pickle himself, and enters into agreement with Mr. Tough Collector to sell some assets to raise cash. Due to inartful drafting by his attorney, the $500,000 loan gets transferred to Mr. Tough Collector. So our hapless entrepreneur is going to face a shakedown by Mr. Tough Collector in five years, since absent winning the lotto, he looks unlikely to have $500,000, and will probably have to go bankrupt.

Bank of America's situation is a lot like that of the borrower who has a looming obligation he can't meet. But unlike having a well identified big debt to pay down the road, the financial behemoth faces large but uncertain in size payments in the future thanks to pending and growing lawsuits to recover alleged damages resulting from the misdeeds of its acquisition, Countrywide. The current wave of litigation that has investors rattled results from Countrywide telling investors that the loans they were packing into securities were much better than they really were.

The Charlotte bank tried to put most of that problem behind it by entering into a settlement for $8.5 billion, which if they can pull it off, will be the bargain of the century. But that deal is being challenged on multiple fronts, including by New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman. It looks like that pact either will not go through or will be renegotiated substantially and cost Bank of America a good deal more.

Another blow landed Monday when it was sued by AIG for $10 billion, for the same sort of liability it was seeking to discharge in the settlement. If one investor thinks it is owed $10 billion on $28 billion of mortgages,. or 35%, when the old settlement deal for $8.5 billion was for only about 3.5% of the total amount of bonds, that alone shows how much more Bank of America might have to shell out.

And that's only one risk Bank of America faces. The meteor-hitting-the-financial-system sort of lawsuit, which no one has dared to launch, would attack originators and packagers like Countrywide for failing to transfer mortgages properly to the mortgages securities in the first place, in violation of their own contract. This astonishing and apparently widespread "securitization fail" is leading to more and more underwater homeowners successfully challenging foreclosures in court. And it is also leading to banks undermining the rule of law. The robosigning scandal of last fall is only the tip of the iceberg. Both Schneiderman and Delaware's attorney general Beau Biden are investigating conduct by mortgage securitizers on a broad basis. Schneiderman's objection to the Bank of America settlement notes:

The ultimate failure of Countrywide to transfer complete mortgage loan documentation to the Trusts hampered the Trusts' ability to foreclose on delinquent mortgages, thereby impairing the value of the notes secured by those mortgages. These circumstances apparently triggered widespread fraud, including BoA's fabrication of missing documentation.

This language suggests that he may be considering legal action against Bank of America over this issue.

 

And on top of that, Bank of America has roughly $125 billion of home equity loans and other second liens on its balance sheet. Most of these will be worth nothing in a foreclosure but bank like BofA have taken only relatively modest writedowns because they are applying strong arm tactics to borrowers to persuade them to pay (in preference to the first mortgage which is actually senior). And for home equity loans, which are the overwhelming majority of the bank's second liens, the banks can count a loan as current even if the borrower sends only a partial payment (this isn't the case with first mortgages). So they are a great vehicle for extend and pretend.

The danger of BofA lumbering on if it is truly insolvent is that its counterparties and creditors are effectively throwing good money after bad. The poster child of this phenomenon is Greece, which virtually all economists agree is going to have to default on its loans or have them restructured. But since May of 2010, the Eurozone supervising adults have engaged in a succession of rescue packages, the latest of which was economically equivalent to a restructuring, but far short of what was necessary. The ultimate result will be bigger losses than if the problem were dealt with sooner.

Banking expert Chris Whalen, in a Reuters opinion piece today, argues that Bank of America needs to be put into Dodd Frank resolution because it threatens other banks and the economy. But no one has ever used the new Dodd Frank approach, and both the Bank of International Settlements and the well respected Institute for International Finance have said Dodd Frank won't work on overseas operations. This is a major problem, since the Bank of America subsidiary has major trading operations around the world. Merrill was too big to fail before the crisis, and Dodd Frank's only viable approach for dealing with major dealer firms is to get them sold, rather than to resolve them.A former Treasury official has also expressed serious doubts. But no banks look like obvious Merrill buyers, ex a subsidy, and it's hard to imagine subsidies will be easy to arrange with the Tea Party on an anti-spending and anti-Federal Reserve warpath.

So Bank of America is a sword of Damocles over the banking system, and looks more and more troubled as time passes. Yet the history of the crisis and its aftermath suggests that the officialdom is loath to intervene unless forced to. And we know how well that turned out the last time around.

The exclusively foreign proclivity for violence

By Murtaza Hussain

Mass shootings such as the one this week in Copley, Ohio have become such a normal part of the American news cycle that they barely even register in the minds of most citizens. When a member of society goes on a violent rampage at a school or workplace there are perhaps a few days of news coverage and lamentations over the loss of life but there is generally little societal reflection upon the root causes of these acts or indeed why these types of incidents are so exceedingly common. Furthermore, despite the regularity of these shootings they do nothing to impede the self-perception of Americans as somehow being immune and apart from the nihilistic violence which they perceive as being the sole domain of others.

When violence happens somewhere else, it is because the people of that place are inherently violent and barbaric and it is viewed as a reflection upon their society in general. Individuals believed to be representative of that society are demanded to reflect upon their societal failings and to offer penance for "their" actions. On the other hand when violence happens at home it is not reflective upon the broader society at all and it is always an aberration needing no further explanation, regardless of the shocking regularity with which it occurs. To say that the substantive difference stems from the fact that violence is somehow rare in America, a country which is undoubtedly one of the most stable and prosperous in the world, is to ignore the reality of what goes on in the U.S. on a regular basis. Since 9/11 there have been approximately 150,000 violent deaths in the United States, a figure which is all the more shocking for the fact that it is somehow considered normal in an ostensibly peaceful society.

Of course, the average American has almost no control over preventing atrocities such as the Copley shooting and they rightly feel no compulsion to individually denounce it or to make clear that these types of events are not a reflection of their culture. To say that Americans are somehow inherently violent, or to view Americans in general with suspicion because of an act committed by some American somewhere would be absurd, yet this is exactly the logic which is applied to others around the world. In the wake of an even more grotesque massacre such as the one which occurred at Virginia Tech, there was no questioning as to whether Americans were somehow collectively to blame for one of their citizens perpetrating such an act; the responsibility for the act was ascribed to the perpetrator alone and rightly so. However, when violent crimes are committed by members of other societies it is somehow extrapolated to be an indictment of that society as a whole, regardless of how deeply unpopular the act itself may be within that society.

Here is an example from esteemed former U.S. Institute of Peace board member Daniel Pipes, in the wake of the murder of two popular pro-Palestinian activists this past year:

"These murders neatly sum up the frenzy and depravity within Palestinian society, surely the sickest on earth."

This type of broad demonization of entire countries and ethnicities based upon the actions of individuals is patently ridiculous and yet is the bread and butter of propagandists and bigots. If one chose, the same logic could be held against the United States as well and could be used to maliciously impugn the character of ordinary Americans based on the fact that a significant number of killings also occur on a regular basis within American society.

Another example came in the aftermath of violent protests in Afghanistan following the Terry Jones Quran burning incident. The protests culminated in the violent deaths of staff at a UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif, about which The New Republic contributing editor James Kirchick had this to say:

"People who riot and murder at the burning of a book do not need a pretext to act like savages. That's exactly what they already are."

Never mind the racial dog whistling in the language (used to great effect by many others as well) while we are looking at the case of Afghanistan how would Kirchick like to characterize the actions of the U.S. soldiers which comprised the "Kill Team," and what implications would he like to draw from their actions about American character and civilization as a whole?

Excerpt from the Rolling Stone article "The Kill Team":

….. the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin's bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy's head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.

No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon's popular and hard-charging squad leader. "It was like another day at the office for him," one soldier recalls. Gibbs started "messing around with the kid," moving his arms and mouth and "acting like the kid was talking." Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic's shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy's pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.

As horrific and undoubtedly "savage" any objective human being would have to admit these actions were, it would still obviously be wrong to smear Americans in general with any such pejorative, or to make sweeping, bigoted generalizations about their culture. As for collectively reflecting upon crimes, if it is too much to ask American society to feel as though they "own" the wars of the past decade and the extreme violence which they have entailed, or that they "own" the members of their society who go on mass-murdering rampages, it is certainly too much to demand any other society feel the same about the crimes of their individual members.

Murtaza Hussain blogs at Revolution by the Book and is on Twitter at @MazMHussain.

The right's non-reaction to the London riots

By Mark Adomanis

London has been ablaze for the past three nights and has experienced what is clearly its worst civil unrest in decades. The rioting has now spread to other cities in England and no one really knows how much longer it will last. I spoke to some friends in London and they described an otherworldly atmosphere of panic and disorder: rumors are now swirling that the Police have been instructed to use rubber bullets to disperse the crowds, and riot control units from the length and breadth of the entire country are converging on London to bring the situation back into some sort of control.

Using a phenomenon as complex, unwieldy, and unpredictable as a riot to score political points is dangerous. As Paul Campos of the blog Lawyers Guns & Money said, "Urban riots are usually complex events, in which people participate for many reasons, ranging from simple boredom and criminal opportunism on one end, to conscious political protest on the other."

Judging from all available press reports, it seems that the rioters have no clear political grievances whatsoever besides, perhaps, a generalized hatred of the better off and "the system." Most of the violence, theft, and property destruction have been committed by people that seem to be taking advantage of the atmosphere of chaos to pocket clothing, electronics, and food that they might otherwise be unaffordable. In other words, while there are undoubtedly some "root causes" the violence in London, which has occurred overwhelmingly within immigrant communities themselves, seems to be almost entirely about opportunistic criminality and inchoate rage.

Notably absent from the London riots, and from any press reporting about them, is a religious angle. Almost all accounts, from left-wing and right-wing press outlets alike, agree that the disturbances are overwhelmingly about class tensions, and are not about race or religion -- one can peruse images of the rioters and quite easily see that the youth are a mixed collection of (to use British parlance) Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, and whites.

To say that the conservative press has been reticent to comment about the London rioting would be a pretty serious understatement. Ground zero for movement conservatives, National Review Online's The Corner didn't have its first post up about the London riots until almost 8 PM on August 8th, and that was a simple cut-and-paste from the Daily Telegraph. As of the writing of this article, roughly 9am on Tuesday August 9th, The Corner had one additional post by the same author that was also largely a cutting-and-pasting of another article from the Daily Telegraph. Noted civilization warriors such as Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, and Daniel Pipes, who have in the past shouted themselves horse about the lethal danger that multiculturalism poses to "The West," haven't said anything at all.

National Review writers, however, did manage to find the time to write posts about: the debt ceiling crisis, the administration's treatment of S&P, the Iowa primary, Rick Perry, Margaret Thatcher, union busting in Wisconsin, the Tea Party (or to be more particular, the media's horribly unfair treatment of it), the Eurozone, and the issue of "liberal media bias."

The Weekly Standard's blog was little different -- the first post mentioning the London riots appeared at 7PM on August 8th and was simply the pasting of a link to an article in the Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun. Weekly Standard writers did have enough time to cover Tibet's new leader, union busting in Wisconsin, several aspects of Barack Obama's wretchedness, Afghanistan, and the "national popular vote" effort to reform the electoral college.

Over at Commentary, meanwhile, there hasn't been anything about the riots in London but, over the past three days, there have been articles about Mitt Romney, the US-Israel alliance, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, allegations of Newsweek's sexism, and several articles on the comprehensive wretchedness of Barack Obama.

Now it is always difficult, of course, to complain about something that hasn't actually been written -- if you made a point of criticizing someone only for things that they hadn't done, you would (justifiably) be considered crazy.

However, I very clearly remember the far more energetic, effusive, and borderline hysterical manner in which the conservative press reacted to a series of riots in Paris back in the fall of 2005. I remember because, back then, I myself was something of a lunatic neoconservative and even joined in with a thoroughly wretched contribution to the "Muslims are scary and evil!" chorus.

Rather than shout myself hoarse describing the hypocrisy and double standards of people who bravely label themselves defenders or moral absolutism, and who never tire of accusing liberals of "relativism," I'm simply going to paste some choice quotes that conservatives used to describe the Paris riots which were, in scale and intensity, broadly similar to those which are now taking place in London. You can decide for yourselves whether their rhetoric and outrage about rioting Muslim youth in Paris matches their near-total silence about rioting multi-ethnic and multi-religious youth in London:

The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule…the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. -- Mark Steyn
That French officials show no sign, on the eighth day of the Paris riots, of recognizing that this clash of values is the heart of the problem only guarantees that before they will be able to say that their difficulties with their Muslim population are behind them, many more cars will be torched, many more buildings burned, and many more lives destroyed. -- Robert Spencer
Geography, size, and number of Muslims all make France a pivotal element in what amounts to a cultural conflict of continental dimensions. Added to the Madrid bombings of 3/11/04 and the London bombings of 7/11/05, the riots in France force the old continent to realize that there is a "Muslim problem" related to, but not just to, the Islamist terrorist problem -- Michael Radu
The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of "Allahu Akbar" may be a turning point in European history…The French can respond in three ways. They can feel guilty and appease the rioters with prerogatives and the "massive investment plan" some are demanding. Or they can heave a sigh of relief when it ends and, as they did after earlier crises, return to business as usual. Or they can understand this as the opening salvo in a would-be revolution and take the difficult steps to undo the negligence and indulgence of past decades. -- Daniel Pipes
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada… It is now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into "the superior French culture," but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire. -- Amir Taheri

How can rioting by disaffected youth in one Western European capital city be evidence of a titanic civilizational struggle and of a all-out "civil war" while rioting by disaffected youth in another Western European capital city is evidence of nothing in particular? Surely it doesn't reflect an undue focus on Islam as a religion, right?

UPDATE

After I finished writing this post, I went back to check NRO, and two of their writers had finally responded to the London rioting by doing more than cutting and pasting a newspaper article.

I'll let you decide whether these rather tepid efforts, which seem to reflect a generalized dislike of the underclass as opposed to fear that "THE MUSLIMS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD," are in keeping with previous conservative hysteria on the topic of youth rioters.

While Glenn Greenwald is away this week, Mark Adomanis, who maintains The Russia Hand at Forbes, is filing periodic pieces

The moral supporters of terrorism

On July 22, 2011 a bombing and shooting massacre was carried out in Norway by an individual motived by fanatic anti-immigrant and Islamophobic beliefs; an atrocity which shocked the world and which could only honestly be described as terrorism. The perpetrator, himself an ethnic Norwegian, hoped to bring about political change through acts of wanton violence against civilians, many of them children and young adults. That this was indeed terrorism is important to note, given that at present Western civilization is purportedly at war with terrorism itself, as well as, crucially, those who provide inspiration and support to terrorists. In this battle those who are even tangentially related to acts of terrorism or purveyors of terror are liable to be incarcerated without due process, tortured, and even killed without public outcry. From the perspective of the state, such is the seriousness of terrorism and such are the extraordinary measures which must be taken to prevent terror from being carried out.

In his manifesto, Anders Breivik the perpetrator of the Oslo attacks cited among his inspirations many prominent intellectuals and media figures whose ideas he admired and whose views on topics such as Islam and immigration he strongly identified with. Although many of these individuals have strongly insinuated that perpetrating mass violence in the service of their anti-Muslim agenda is laudable and desirable, it can be reasonably argued that it is unfair to condemn them for actions which, though perpetrated in the name of their ideas, were carried out without their specific consent. Regardless of whether one puts forth odious and potentially dangerous ideologies it can be justifiably said that holding individuals accountable for how others may interpret and act upon their opinions goes against freedom of expression and is potentially deleterious to the marketplace of ideas which should exist in all free societies.

However, what is notable then about the case of Breivik is not so much whom he cited as potentially unwitting inspirations to his act of terrorism, but those who actually leapt to support and justify his actions after it had become undeniably clear that he was in fact a terrorist. While they may distance themselves from the individual, they go out of their way in the wake of his murderous terrorist attack to justify and validate the ideals he killed for.

Here are a few choice quotes regarding the Oslo attack:

"I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don't get my pity. They never will."

 

 

 

"Karma is a bitch . . . especially for Jew-haters who were Fatah's bitch. You hang out with snakes, you get bitten."
"Victims" or Perpetrators?" -- Debbie Schlussel, 7/28/11
"There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler youth.." -- Glenn Beck, 7/25/11
"The more that is revealed about that youth indoctrination center, the more grotesque the whole story becomes"
"The jihad-loving media never told us what antisemitic war games they were playing on that island. Utoya Island is a Communist/Socialist campground, and they clearly had a pro-Islamic agenda." -- Pamela Geller, 7/31/11
"The youth camp he attacked was engaged in what was essentially a pro-terrorist program." -- Barry Rubin, 7/31/2011

 

Try to imagine what the reaction to comments such as these would be in the wake of an attack by Islamic extremists. Aside from the vile slander against the victims of a horrifying crime, these words are a clear attempt to justify and legitimize the actions of Breivik. Claiming to oppose violence while simultaneously characterizing the victims of said violence as Nazis and terrorists sends the implicit message that such violence is in fact understandable and laudable. After all, who wouldn't be inclined to view as permissible violence committed against Nazis and terrorists, and how could one who does commit violence against those parties be said to be unequivocally condemnable? The supreme twisted irony is that those who claim to be appalled by his act of violence while steadfastly defending his motivations very closely mimic the position of Breivik himself who described his actions as being "atrocious but necessary." Violence against "Nazis and terrorists" may not be "nice," but hey, they are "Nazis and terrorists."

In the context of fighting a war against terrorism, and with all the dot-connecting, guilt by-association tactics which that entails, the individuals who inspired and then defended the bigoted motivations of the Oslo terrorist have largely escaped recrimination. Those so open about their sympathies with an ideology which had just given rise to such an atrocity would normally come under harsh, justified scrutiny, not just from the public but perhaps also from law enforcement agencies tasked with preventing the fomentation of further terrorism. By sole virtue of the race and religion of the terrorist in this case those who motivated him have been left unchecked and continue to openly expound the nihilistic ideals which may well inspire the next Anders Breivik.

On her website, Pamela Geller in 2007 shared approvingly an email she received from a source in Norway whom she has kept anonymous. The email reads as follows:

From Israel the hordes clawing at the walls of Jerusalem proclaim cheerfully that next year there will be no more Israel, and I know Israel shrugs this off as do I, and will mount a strike during the summer against all of its enemies in the middle east. This will make the muslims worldwide go into a frenzy, attacking everyone around them.

We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.

Before, I thought about emigrating to Britain, Israel, USA, South Africa, etc. for taxes and politics, but instead (although I believe we are the very last generation on earth before the return of God) I will stay and fight for the right to this country and indeed the entire peninsula, for the God-fearing people, just in case this isn't the end of the world after all. Doesn't hurt to have a backup plan.

 

Individuals engaged in racial and religious demagoguery have succeeded in giving rise to terrorism in the name of their ideals, and in the wake of what their actions have produced they've shown no remorse or reticence about continuing to fan the flames of hatred and violence. If those who enthusiastically promote ideologies which inspire terrorism are unwilling to even report or disclose details of planned violence by their followers, the question must be asked as to what level of darkness we must descend before their destructive actions are taken seriously.

Why are the big banks getting off scot-free?

By Yves Smith

For most citizens, one of the mysteries of life after the crisis is why such a massive act of looting has gone unpunished. We've had hearings, investigations, and numerous journalistic and academic post mortems. We've also had promises to put people in jail by prosecutors like Iowa's attorney general Tom Miller walked back virtually as soon as they were made. 

Yet there is undeniable evidence of institutionalized fraud, such as widespread document fabrication in foreclosures (mentioned in the motion filed by New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman opposing the $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with investors) and the embedding of impermissible charges (known as junk fees and pyramiding fees) in servicing software, so that someone who misses a mortgage payment or two is almost certain to see it escalate into a foreclosure. And these come on top of a long list of runup-to-the-crisis abuses, including mortgage bonds having more dodgy loans in them than they were supposed to, banks selling synthetic or largely synthetic collateralized debt obligations as being just the same as ones made of real bonds when the synthetics were created for the purpose of making bets against the subprime market and selling BBB risk at largely AAA prices, and of course, phony accounting at the banks themselves.

Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson lament this sorry state of affairs in an article today on a $10 billion lawsuit expected to be filed today by AIG against Bank of American over dodgy mortgage securities: 

The private actions stand in stark contrast to the few credit crisis cases brought by the Justice Department, which is wrapping up many of its inquiries into big banks without filing any charges. The lack of prosecutions — the Justice Department has brought three cases against employees at large financial companies and none against executives at large banks — has left private litigants, mainly investors and consumers, standing more or less alone in trying to hold financial parties accountable. 

"When federal authorities don't fulfill their obligation to enforce the law, they essentially give an imprimatur to the financial entities to do whatever they want and disregard the law," said Kathleen C. Engel, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. "To the extent there are places where shareholders and borrowers can pursue claims, they are really serving the function of the government. They are our private attorneys general." 

But this isn't really true. Even when the plaintiffs in these suits prevail, it just transfers funds from one company to another. The real perps, the executives and line managers involved in the bad behavior, almost always get off scot free. The few cases where we have seen individual executives targeted, such as Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide and Gary Crittenden of Citigroup, the fines are chump change compared to their compensation.

This sorry situation parallels the aftermath of the Great Crash in 1929. Precisely because the securities laws were weak to non-existent, conduct that was fraudulent by common sense standards ("deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage") was kosher under the law. The only high profile case in the wake of that crisis was the remarkable fall from grace of patrician Richard Whitney, former head of the New York stock exchange. As the marvelous book Once in Golconda recounts, Whitney had the unfortunate combination of having a very costly lifestyle and being a terrible speculator. He filled the gap for a while by borrowing from friends but finally resorted to embezzlement. Whitney, unlike our modern miscreants, 'fessed up to his crimes when they came to light, took responsibility for them, and went to Sing Sing.

But that era's publicity and investigations did lead to well though out, durable financial reforms that served the US well for over 50 years Why have they proven to be useless in the new millennium?

It would take a book to recount how once well regulated financial markets were turned back into a casino, and one of the best one stop accounts of the legal changes is Frank Partnoy's Infectious Greed. But let me describe some of the major culprits.

The first measure, and its effects go well beyond the financial markets, was to make the courts far more friendly to business. A well funded effort dates back to the early 1980s to change the teaching of law to produce more pro-business attitudes. An overview of the law and economics movement from "ECONNED": 

The third avenue for promoting and institutionalizing the "free market" ideology was inculcating judges. It was one of the most far-reaching actions the radical right wing could take. Precedents are powerful, and the bench turns over slowly... While conservative scholars like Richard Posner and Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago trained some of the initial right-leaning jurists, attorney Henry Manne gave the effort far greater reach. Manne established his "law and economics" courses for judges, which grew into the Law and Economics Center, which in 1980 moved from the University of Miami to Emory in Atlanta and eventually to George Mason University. 

Manne had gotten the backing of over 200 conservative sponsors, including some known for extreme right-wing views, such as the Adolph Coors Company, plus many of the large U.S. corporations that were also funding the deregulation effort....

Manne approached his effort not simply as education, but as a political movement... The program expanded to include seminars for judges, training in legal issues for economists, and an economics institute for Congressional aides...

It is hard to overstate the change this campaign produced, namely, a major shift in jurisprudence. As Steven Teles of the University of Maryland noted:

Moving law and economics' status from "off the wall" to "controversial but respectable" required a combination of celebrity and organizational entrepreneurship. . . . Mannes' programs for federal judges helped erase law and economics' stigma, since if judges— the symbol of legal professional respectability—took the ideas seriously, they could not be crazy and irresponsible.

Now why was the law and economics vantage seen as "off the wall?... The law and economics promoters sought to colonize legal minds. And, to a large extent they succeeded. For centuries (literally), jurisprudence had been a multifaceted subject aimed at ordering human affairs. The law and economics advocates wanted none of that. They wanted their narrow construct to play as prominent a role as possible.

The second route was getting more conservative judges on the bench. Most readers are probably aware of the ongoing fight over Federal judicial appointments, as both Democratic and Republican administrations seek to install sympathetic jurists, and the opposing party, when it can, fights the effort. But less well known is the state and local analogue to this effort, and here again, the campaign by corporate interests has paid off handsomely.

My favorite illustration is the Alabama Supreme Court. Alabama was once one of the favored states for launching class action litigation, since Alabama residents were particularly keen on handing out big damage awards. The Alabama Supreme Court elections are now the most expensive state supreme court elections in the nation, with the spending exceeding that of Alabama gubernatorial campaigns. And the effort has provided a great return on investment. The Alabama Supreme Court is guaranteed to reduce any punitive damages award to at most $1 million. In the financial arena, the difficulty of launching criminal cases is both statutory and bureaucratic. Securities law, thanks to the Depression-era reforms, is the most favorable grounds for action, since it sets forth a very high standard for disclosure. The critical language come in Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Act of 1934:

It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange, (a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, (b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or (c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.

The requirement in (b) is particularly important, the prohibition against making material omissions. Now with this great weapon, why hasn't the SEC done more? One basic reason is it can't pursue criminal prosecutions on its own. It needs to go through the Department of Justice. Needless to say, the DoJ has been missing in action for pretty much all of the Obama administration.

A second reason is that the statute of limitations on securities litigation is effectively three years. Since the market for subprime dreck died permanently in July 2007, it's too late to file claims using securities law theories (unless they relate to continuing statements in SEC filings). Wronged parties can still use contract law theories, but the standards for fraud are higher (more on that shortly).

The third is that the SEC has been kept budget starved for years, starting in the Clinton Administration. Former SEC chief Arthur Levitt, who was generally industry-friendly but was serious about protecting consumers, was regularly threatened by the Senator from Hedgistan, Joe Lieberman. As a result, the SEC has become incompetent at pursuing anything other than insider trading cases (it did score a big success in Enron, but seemed unable to build on that).

A fourth barrier is the use of lawyers and accountants as shields. Do you remember the Lehman Repo 105 chicanery, in which it moved over $50 billion off its balance sheet at the end of the quarter in what was pure and simple accounting chicanery? The bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas concluded there was no basis for criminal charges, and the reason was simple: they'd gotten a UK law firm to bless the ruse. 

So even if you aggressively shopped for a dubious opinion to give you cover for something that didn't pass the smell test, you as executive can bat your baby blues and say, "Gee, I'm just a businessman, I defer to experts on these matters," and you are home free as far as fraud is concerned.

But....you may squawk, what about going after the unscrupulous lawyers and accountants? Well, it just so happens we can't bust any more accounting firms, since we are down to four and so they are all too big to fail, and no prosecutors seem willing to sue big white shoe law firms (perhaps because they aren't terribly well staffed and a large firm would seek to engage in a costly war of attrition, as well as enlist all of its deep pocket fancy firm peers to fund his opponent in the next election). And private plaintiffs are barred from action. As incredible as it seems, if an investor loses money, say because a crooked accounting firm cooked the books, he can't sue the accountant. Only his client, meaning the company that hired him, can. Again from "ECONNED": 

[The Supreme Court, via a 1994 decision, reduced investor protection. In a stunning show of illogic, the court ruled in Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver that plaintiffs could not sue advisors like investment bankers, accountants, and lawyers for aiding and abetting securities fraud. A suit against them could only proceed if the defendant was charged with primary liability, meaning the damaged party was his client. This was a radical decision, reversing sixty years of court and administrative rulings. Thus, for instance, if an accountant signed off on fraudulent financial statements that an investor relied upon, the investor could no longer pursue the accountant to recover any losses that resulted from the unraveling of the fraud. Yet in criminal law, an accessory, like the car driver in a bank robbery, is subject to prosecution along with the gunmen who took the cash. 

In theory, the SEC has another big weapon it could use, Sarbanes Oxley. Since Sarbanes Oxley became law in 2002, Sections 302, 404, and 906 of that act have required executives to establish and maintain adequate systems of internal control within their companies. In addition, they must regularly test such controls to see that they are adequate and report their findings to shareholders (through SEC reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K) and their independent accountants. "Knowingly" making false section 906 certifications is subject to fines of up to $1 million and imprisonment of up to ten years; "willful" violators face fines of up to $5 million and jail time of up to 20 years.

This makes for a politically less risky path for the SEC. It could file a civil claim, and if it prevailed, it has what would seem to be a virtual slam dunk in then filing criminal charges, since the language of the two sections (302 and 906) track each other.

It is blooming obvious that for a financial firm, "internal control" has to include risk controls, and at virtually all the big financial firms, they were woefully deficient, by design. Risk management is politically weak; the staff are typically trying to curry favor with the business side to get more lucrative jobs with them; risk managers are generally loath to tangle in a serious way with profit centers. It's almost certain that you can't have an adequate system of internal controls if you all of a sudden drop multi-billion dollar loss bombs on investors out of nowhere. Banks are not supposed to gamble with depositors' and investors' money like an out-of-luck punter at a racetrack. It's pretty clear many of the banks who went to the wall or had to be bailed out because they were too big to fail, and we can toss AIG in here as well, since they had no idea they were betting the farm every day with the risks they were taking.

So why hasn't the SEC used Sarbox? Our reading is they were deterred by a widely overlooked ruling in SEC v. Mozilo, in which the judge (with no explanation) nixed that the SEC could file both securities laws charges and Sarbox charges in that case (the judge treated it as double dipping). The judge's negative ruling on a separate Sarbox charge on securities violations does not rule out other types of Sarbox charges, but the SEC incorrectly seems to have reacted this way. Remember, the part of Sarbox that gave a lot of boards fits was that the CEO and the CFO certify the adequacy of internal controls (Section 404). That goes above and beyond traditional SEC representations.

What about legal theories for fraud ex securities law? If a party is suing for fraud in most other commercial contexts, they must establish intent, that is, that they meant to deceive. That isn't as easy as it sounds. Even if you find damning-sounding e-mails, as the SEC did in its failed effort to sue the managers of two Bear Stearns hedge funds, there are often other communiques in the same time frame that can muddy the waters. It is frequently possible for people who have engaged in bad conduct to offer up plausible-sounding rationales and point to actions that appear to support it.

So the only solution, it seems, is to go back and have another go at rewriting the rules. It's worth noting that Dodd Frank got at none of these issues, so it appears we need to have another crisis to create a second opportunity. And it may be starting as we speak.

Yves Smith is the creator of the blog Naked Capitalism and author of "ECONNED: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism"

Did the Russians bomb a U.S. embassy?

Eli Lake, a Washington Times reporter and one of the most prominent right-wing voices on foreign policy and "security" issues, and someone who has in the past called me an "illiterate child," has published over the past several weeks a number of articles alleging that the Russians were responsible for an utterly bizarre (and thankfully botched) attempt at bombing the US embassy in Tblisi back in September 2010. Media reports have differed on the precise specifics, but there is general agreement that a small bomb (about a kilogram of TNT) exploded, and another was defused, about a hundred meters away from the external wall of the US embassy.

Lake's first article, published on July 27, is titled "Classified report: Russia tied to blast at U.S. embassy" and confidently asserts that Russian guilt has been proven by the US intelligence community. The central argument of the article is the following:

The highly classified report about the Sept. 22 incident was described to The Washington Times by two U.S. officials who have read it. They said the report supports the findings of the Georgian Interior Ministry, which traced the bombing to a Russian military intelligence office. "It is written without hedges, and it confirms the Georgian account," said one U.S. official familiar with the report. This official added that it specifically says the Russian military intelligence, or GRU, coordinated the bombings.

Well, that sounds pretty open and shut, right? Intelligence reports "without hedges" are rarer than democratic politicians with backbones, so there seems to be little left to do other than alert Moscow that we're sending in the marines. Lake's reporting suggests no hints of any disagreement within the US intelligence community, nor does it suggest any alternate possibilities. There is simply conclusive and incontrovertible proof that not only did a Russian military intelligence officer carry out the bombings in question, but, most crucially of all, that he did so under direct orders from his superiors.

Now I am not overly alarmist, but if this were actually the case, if the highest levels of Russian military intelligence have been conclusively proven to be reckless and irresponsible to such a degree that they thought it would be a good idea to place bombs near a US embassy it would be truly terrifying. Indeed if Russia was really that malevolent and aggressively anti-American, if its high-level intelligence professionals thought nothing of trying to bomb a US embassy (which is, of course, an act of war), it would be the most dramatic threat to US security in decades, a threat on an entirely different order of magnitude than the puny bands of al-Qaida fighters our freedom drones are constantly incinerating throughout the Hindu Kush.

Unlike Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, or whichever other "rogue state" is the most recent to be accused of developing WMDs, Russia unquestionably has them in large quantities. Indeed the Russian Federation has more than enough strategic and tactical nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet several times over, and it has the delivery vehicles to get those warheads anywhere in the world within an hour. And while its conventional military forces are rusting and obsolescent, Russia has intelligence services and spy networks that, while they have arguably fallen on hard times as of late have generally earned a fearsome reputation and are known worldwide for their cunning, efficacy, and ruthlessness.

Compared to the pathetic efforts of al-Qaida and similar organizations to gain access to classified US information or to penetrate the intelligence apparatus, the Russians have proven highly competent at getting agents inside both US and allied Western governments. As just one recent example, the Russians successfully placed a spy at the highest levels of the Estonian Defense ministry and, through him, were able to gain access to thousands of pages of highly classified NATO documents.

All of this is to say that if the Russians have really lost their marbles, if they've decided to go all-in on confrontation, ordered their agents to cavalierly go about bombing US embassies, and essentially started a new cold war, then we're in for some really serious trouble because the FSB is a heck of a lot more organized, flexible, and formidable than al-Qaida. And if the American public was willing to accede to the Patriot Act, one's mind reels at the sorts of civil-liberties-crushing legislation to which they would assent if they were convinced that Vladimir Putin and his evil henchmen were minutes away from invading.

However, Lake's second article, "Russia Uses Dirty Tricks Despite US Reset," published a week later on August 4, adds a few details which, to put it exceedingly mildly, complicate things. Unlike the first article which asserted that there was no doubt whatsoever about the involvement of Russian officialdom in the bombing, this article includes a piece of information whose importance is hard to exaggerate:

The CIA concluded that Mr. Borisov was acting on orders from Russian military intelligence headquarters, according to these officials. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research assessed that Mr. Borisov was acting as a rogue agent, these officials said.

The single sentence I bolded, which appears more than half-way through Lake's second story, shows that the US government's own intelligence agencies can't even agree on the most crucial question: Was Borisov following orders, or did he act alone? Whatever happened to "without hedges?" Does the fact that another US intelligence agency thinks differently no longer count as a hedge? The fact that the State Department does not think that Borisov was following orders totally negates the most sensational and hard-hitting finding of the earlier story from July 27, a story that was, predictably, bandied about in the conservative blogosphere as evidence of Obama's cowardice and pusillanimity, the utter failure of the reset, and the essential evilness of the Russian regime.

The basic disagreement between the CIA and the State Department on the most important aspect of the entire episode should be a giant red flag to a journalist, and would lead any minimally inquisitive person to ask a number of questions such as: Since Borisov is not in Georgian custody, what is the nature of the evidence that so conclusively proves he was acting under orders? Videotapes? Audio recordings? A confession from a co-conspirator? And if this evidence from the Georgians is so overwhelming and straightforward, why can't the State Department and the CIA agree on its interpretation? What specifically led the CIA to attribute Borisov's activity to the GRU, and what specifically led the State Department to attribute it to a rogue operative? Has the disagreement between the CIA and State occurred from the start, or is it a more recent development? And, at a higher level, what possible motivation would the Russians have to take the almost unbelievably provocative action of bombing a US embassy? And, finally, why would they do this at a time when, by all accounts, their relations with Washington were improving?

But even if those questions are somehow off-limits, anyone with a passing knowledge of the last decade of US history, much less a journalist whose job is to cover the security and foreign policy community, would know that, in a situation where the US government can't even get its intelligence agencies to agree on basic facts, the most prudent course of action is to wait for more information. How is that the least bit controversial? Am I the only person who remembers the lead up to the Iraq war and the titanic failures at virtually every level of the US government, or is it somehow in bad taste, evidence of a lack of patriotism or a disposition towards "appeasement," to note that our intelligence community really doesn't have a very good track record on these sorts of things? Before scuttling relations with the country that possesses the world's largest nuclear arsenal, as would be the only responsible course of action if the Russian government really did try to bomb one of our embassies, is it really so much to ask that our various super-secret-spy agencies come to a basic agreement on arcane and esoteric topics such as, "Did the Russian government actually order the bombing in Tbilisi?"

Of course, the lack of information, and the pervasiveness of classification, is precisely the problem. The US government so routinely classifies such vast troves of information that a great deal of what is first reported as "fact" is later revealed to be little more than unsupported gossip and innuendo. As an American citizen I would like to think that if my country's sovereign territory has been attacked by the Russian government, I can actually look at the evidence and weigh it for myself and not simply rely on a few snippets of information that has been "leaked" by anonymous "experts" within the intelligence community to a reporter from the Washington Times. To put it more straightforwardly: the consequences of Lake's allegations are so serious, and have such startling implications, that all of the information about them ought to become part of the public domain.

It should go without saying that none of this suggests that the Russians are angels. It is a dreary thing to have to repeat, but pointing out that specific allegation X about a nasty foreign government might not be true does not mean that one supports, or is positively predisposed to, that foreign government. I'm virtually positive that someone will call me a "Putin apologist" for pointing out that Lake's interpretation of the bombing makes very little logical sense. Furthermore, given the facts of the matter, even the most favorable interpretation of the evidence suggests that, at an absolute minimum, a relatively senior Russian military intelligence officer went rogue and exploded a bomb next to a US embassy. That is an extremely serious development, and I am not laughing it off.

However, if, as seems likely to me, Borisov was a lone wolf, the interpretation of events is precisely the opposite of what Lake and the rest of the conservative establishment seem to be suggesting. That is, Russia is not ruled by omnipotent evil geniuses who have embarked on a far reaching plan to enslave the freedom loving people of Georgia and destroy US influence in the Caucasus, nor is it run by lunatics who think nothing of lobbing a few kilograms of TNT at a US embassy. Rather, Russia is a relatively ramshackle country with the GDP per-capita of Mexico that cannot even maintain full control over its own intelligence operatives. That is not "good," but it obviously calls for a very different set of policy response and a very different order of priorities.

Next week

I'm going to be on vacation from Salon beginning tomorrow until next Monday, August 15.  I've arranged for three excellent guest-bloggers, each of whom, beginning this Monday, will more or less post something here every day:  

(1) Yves Smith, the former Goldman Sachs and McKinsey official who is now the author of the Naked Captialism blog and of the book "ECONned" -- which documented the pervasive Wall Street crimes spawning the 2008 financial crisis -- and is one of the nation's best analysts of the political conflicts over finance and economics;

(2) Murtaza "Maz" Hussain, a Pakistani student currently based in Toronto who works with immigrant and refugee youth and who writes very trenchantly about Muslim and foreign policy issues on his blog "Revolution by the Book" and on Twitter; and,

(3) Mark Adamonis, a young writer recently of Oxford and Harvard, who currently blogs at Forbes with a focus on Russia, but whose prior writing covered an eclectic array of political and media issues in a very insightful, acerbic and entertaining manner.

I chose them because they are three of my favorite political commentators and merit a lot more exposure.  They will undoubtedly provide ample excellent content in my absence.  Until Monday, feel free to use the comment section here for all reasonable purposes.

The administration's stated budget priorities

(updated below - Update II)

The theory of Round II of the debt deal is that both parties will be motivated to reach an agreement in the "Super-Committee" on how to reduce the debt by another $1.5 trillion because, if they fail to agree, there will be automatic cuts that are horrendous to each party: draconian domestic cuts will scare Democrats into compromising, while supposedly substantial reductions in military spending will frighten the GOP.  But a serious and quite predictable deviation from that scheme has already emerged: Republicans (at least its Tea Party faction) don't seem bothered at all by the prospects of military cuts, while Democrats -- specifically the Obama administration -- are acting as if such cuts, literally, would be nation-threatening.

Yesterday, President Obama's Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, donned his Dr. Strangelove hat and decried these prospective cuts as a "doomsday mechanism" -- doomsday! -- warning that these would be "very dangerous cuts" that "would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our military's ability to protect the nation."  Then, this morning, we have this from The Washington Post:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Thursday of dire consequences if the Pentagon is forced to make cuts to its budget beyond the $400 billion in savings planned for the next decade.

Senior Pentagon officials have launched an offensive over the past two days to convince lawmakers that further reductions in Pentagon spending would imperil the country's security. Instead of slashing defense, Panetta said, the bipartisan panel should rely on tax increases and cuts to nondiscretionary spending, such as Medicare and Social Security, to provide the necessary savings.

Just think about that for a minute.  We have a Democratic administration installed in power after millions of liberals donated large amounts of their time and money to help elect them.  Yet here we have a top official in the President's cabinet demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to protect the military budget from further reductions.  That's the position of the Democratic administration.  While it's true that Pentagon officials reflexively protect the Pentagon budget, there is zero question that Panetta -- the career-long supremely loyal Democratic Party functionary -- is speaking here on behalf of and with the authorization of the White House; indeed, he said exactly that in the written message he sent about these cuts to the Pentagon's staff ("this outcome would be completely unacceptable to me as Secretary of Defense, the President, and to our nation's leaders").

For all the boastful claims from Panetta and others about how much the Pentagon budget was just cut by the first round of the debt deal, the reality, as McClatchy detailed yesterday, is much different: "The new deficit-cutting law appears to reduce defense spending by $350 billion up front and perhaps by as much as $850 billion over 10 years, but in fact that's highly unlikely to happen."  That's because defense hawks ensured that these initial cuts would be applied not only to "defense" but also "security" spending, which encompasses programs "such as homeland security, border enforcement, foreign aid and even veterans' benefits as potential targets."  Moreover, as Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin explained on Tuesday night on Rachel Maddow's program, the magnitude of this first round of cuts as well as the potential series of automatic cuts in the second round is wildly overstated by administration officials given budgetary gimmicks in how these numbers are derived.

President Obama yesterday instructed his supporters on how to advocate for his re-election, and told them that when they go forth to evangelize about his accomplishments -- as Steve Benen did yesterday with his celebration of Obama as "the most effective politician since Reagan, and depending on the day, perhaps even the most effective politician since LBJ" -- that they should "not to get too bogged down in detail" but instead should emphasize broad themes and values.  As one example of how this avoid-the-details advocacy should work, Obama instructed: "If somebody asks about the war, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan — if it's Iraq, you have a pretty simple answer, which is all our folks are going to be out of there by the end of the year."  Except that appears to be completely untrue, as his administration appears on the verge of succeeding in its many months of efforts to pressure the Iraqi Government to allow U.S. troops to remain in that country well past the 2011 withdrawal deadline Obama repeatedly vowed to enforce (and that's beyond the oversight-free private army which the State Department has long planned to keep in Iraq).

As the U.S. continues to spend almost more than the rest of the world combined on its military while it wages and escalates war in multiple Muslim countries around the world -- to say nothing of the dozens of nations in which it continuously engages in lower-level covert military action -- the very idea that American security would be gravely jeopardized by these cuts is absurd on its face.  If anything, American security is far more endangered by continuing on this path of unbridled militarism and aggression.  Yet here we have the bizarre spectacle of a Democratic administration demanding cuts to Social Security and Medicare in order to protect the defense industry from cuts that are, in any event, far less meaningful than are being depicted.  Given how public they're being with these statements, does anyone have any remaining doubt about the constituencies to which they're actually loyal?

* * * * * 

There are reports this morning that a NATO airstrike killed (another) one of Gadaffi's sons in Libya, so we'll be able to have some collective celebration to keep our minds off little things like the collapsing economy.  It is telling indeed how virtually all political good news -- all national celebrations -- now involve America's ability to kill the latest Bad Guy.  One benefit of Endless War is that it distracts the citizens' attention away from what is being done to them at home and makes them cheer for the leaders who are doing it to them.

 

UPDATE:  Lsat week, Joe Lieberman said we must cut entitlement programs in order to "have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we're at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come."  About that, Joan McCarter wrote: "since the Super Congress has been created specifically to pit defense and safety net programs against each other, don't be surprised if you see this one getting traction" (h/t sysprog)  That is exactly the purpose of the "triggers" and the Super Committee; it is not hard to guess who will prevail in the war between entitlement programs and military spending; and Panetta's statements are little more than a push to ensure the right outcome.

 

UPDATE II:  The New York Times reported the same thing as the Post.  From the first sentence of that paper's article on Panetta's comments: "Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta effectively told Congress on Thursday to raise taxes and cut Social Security and Medicare before taking another swipe at the Pentagon budget beyond defense cuts."  Even Bill Kristol seems more rhetorically restrained than Panetta about these cuts (h/t HTML Mencken).

Various matters

Time constraints will likely prevent me from writing much today, so here are several brief items worth noting:

(1) I have a contribution for the New York Times on the Tea Party for the paper's Room for Debate Op-Ed feature, here.  I also participated in an excellent 12-minute Al Jazeera report on how the media reported on the Oslo attack, which can be viewed here.  And this afternoon, beginning at 2:10 p.m., I'll be on To the Point discussing the debt deal and its political implications, which can be heard here.

 

(2) In February, numerous American Muslims and groups sued the FBI, alleging -- based on the confessions of a former paid FBI informant -- that Muslim individuals and mosques were randomly targeted for surveillance and infiltration in violation of their First Amendment rights and rights to be free from religious discrimination.  So extreme was the FBI informant's efforts to lure mosque members into Terrorist plots -- following the FBI's typical pattern of manufacturing its own plots and then touting it success in stopping them -- that members in one of the targeted mosques actually called law enforcement authorities to report the informant for appearing dangerous and unstable.

Yesterday, the Obama DOJ responded to the lawsuit, and did so, as Josh Gerstein reports, by demanding dismissal based on the "state secrets" privilege -- claiming that even if they violated these Americans' religious freedoms and discriminated against them, "allowing the [claims] to be litigated would require the disclosure of sensitive national security information."  The DOJ's brief repeatedly touts the threat of "homegrown terrorism" to argue that the identity of citizens whom it surveils -- and even the identity of those it does not -- are such vital "state secrets" that courts must not force Executive Branch officials to even respond to these lawsuits. 

So now this secrecy doctrine is used to tell victims of alleged discrimination that their claims cannot even be heard by a court because what was done to them is a "state secret" -- even though courts possess numerous powers to safeguard actual secrets.  Yet again we see the radical perversion of the "state secrets" privilege pioneered by the Bush administration and continued in earnest by the Obama DOJ from what it began as -- a document-specific evidentiary privilege -- into sweeping immunity instrument which literally removes the President and his underlings from the rule of law (even if we broke the law, our actions are too secret to judicially scrutinize).

 

(3) In other news from The Most Transparent Administration Ever, the Senate Intelligence Committee -- led by Dianne Feintsein -- refused to compel the Obama administration to disclose its interpretation of the Patriot Act and, specifically, the domestic surveillance powers it exercises under that law.  Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to compel disclosure of the administration's interpretation of that law on the ground that it so severely departs from the public's (and Congress') understanding of that statute that it amounts, in Wyden's words, to a "secret law, a secret Patriot Act."  As Obama's own chosen (but never confirmed) OLC Chief Dawn Johnsen repetaedly argued, "secret laws" -- where the Executive Branch refuses even to disclose how it is interpreting a Congressional statute -- were one of the most anti-democratic abuses of the Bush years.  Yet here it flourishes.  The Intelligence Committee also refused to compel the Obama administration to estimate how many Americans have been subjected to electronic surveillance under the 2008 FISA Amendments Act supported by then-Senator Obama.

 

(4) In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Thomas Drake (who was prosecuted for whistleblowing by the Obama DOJ) and Jesselyn Radack (who was harassed for the same sin at the hands of the Bush DOJ), have jointly written an Op-Ed documenting that -- as they put it -- the current  "administration's reaction to national-security and intelligence whistle-blowers has been even harsher than the Bush administration's was."  Meanwhile, the U.S. Government's former classification czar -- furious that Drake was prosecuted for leaking documents marked "classified" for which there was no conceivable secrecy concerns -- is trying to strike back against Obama's war on whistleblowers by formally demanding that the NSA officials who improperly classified those documents be punished.  To say that excessive secrecy is a vastly greater problem than unauthorized leaking is to understate the case.

 

(5) In Iraq -- where we have been repeatedly told the U.S. war has ended -- U.S. forces joined Iraqi forces for a night raid on a village near Tikrit "that left the tribal Sheik and two others dead, and several wounded, including two young girls."  That led to the following, from the NYT reporter who visited the village:

Surrounded by perhaps two dozen men, they took us through the village, recounting the raid and blaming the Americans. . . . "We will follow them to America and file cases there against them," one of the villagers said. "There were more than 30 people here that saw what happened and all are ready to be witnesses."

One tribal sheik, Youseff Ahmad, spoke about the debate about the future role of United States forces here that has dominated Iraqi public life of late. "We want them to leave, even before the end of this year," Mr. Ahmad said. "They've destroyed us. They've only brought killing and disaster."

Despite the truth of that last observation, the NYT reporter seems truly mystified that more anger isn't being directed to Iraqi forces or the Iraqi court which approved the raid but, instead, the foreign army is bearing the brunt of the rage.  Meanwhile it was announced last week that the oh-so-autonomous Iraqi government has agreed to pay $400 million to compensate Americans held as "human shields" by Saddam during the Persian Gulf War -- 20 years ago.  I wonder if a similar compensation package is headed toward the latest Iraqis whose lives the U.S. just helped extinguish.  This is all taking place in the context of U.S. efforts to "persuade" the Iraqis to "allow" U.S. troops to remain in Iraq beyond the 2011 withdrawal deadline Obama repeatedly promised to maintain:

Public remarks by Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric whose Sadrist movement is politically powerful, that he would reconstitute his militia if the Americans stay has in some ways masked a deeper anti-American sentiment that courses through Iraqi life, Sunni and Shiites alike. While the debate has sometimes been framed as the Sadrists being the sole voice against a continued United States troop presence, American diplomats, citing polls that aren't public, say the majority of Iraqis have a negative view of the American role in Iraq.

I just can't fathom why they think that way -- so ungrateful are they.  And one can never note enough times how frequently and in how many different countries the U.S. kills innocent people under the direction of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.