John Cassidy's Blog, page 71

Austerity and the Mistaken Lessons of History

I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks, but, before I leave, a word or three about the latest news from Blighty, where George Osborne, arguably the worst Chancellor in modern U.K. history (it’s a tough contest) has just reaffirmed his commitment to austerity policies. Delivering an annual financial review to Parliament on Wednesday, Osborne promised yet another round of spending cuts, this one beginning in April, 2015, which is roughly when the next general election is set to take place.

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N.S.A. Latest: The Secret History of Domestic Surveillance

On a day when President Obama said “I’m not going to be scrambling any jets to get a twenty-nine-year-old hacker”—thank goodness for that—the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman have published another set of N.S.A. documents that detail how the Agency’s domestic-surveillance programs have evolved over the past decade or so. The documents presumably came from Edward Snowden, although the Guardian reports don’t say so explicitly.

The headline news is that, for two years of the Obama Administration—from 2009 to 2011—the N.S.A. continued a previously undisclosed Bush-era program that enabled the Agency to sweep up vast amounts of information about American citizens’ Internet use. This included whom they were e-mailing with and which computers they were using. The program, which went under the code name “Stellar Wind,” was ended in 2011, and hasn’t been restarted, a senior Administration official told the newspaper.

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What the G.O.P. Can Learn From DOMA and the Roberts Court

On a day when gay-rights activists have been cheering from the steps of the Supreme Court to Greenwich Village to the West Coast, an interesting question arises: Just how conservative is the Roberts Court?

Not so long ago, the answer seemed straightforward. In reviewing the Court’s record back in 2010, shortly after the Citizens United decision that upended the nation’s campaign-finance laws, Adam Liptak, the Times’ SCOTUS man, reported that it had “not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory,” and cited some academic research to support his case. In more than sixty per cent of cases, the data showed, the Roberts Court had issued conservative rulings.

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The Vanishing I.R.S. Scandal

With Edward Snowden on the lam, the Supreme Court doing its bit to undermine the Great Society, and Don Draper getting his comeuppance, it’s hard to remember last week, let alone last month. But let’s go back to early May, when another great scandal threatened the fabric of the republic. George Will compared it to Watergate. James Taranto, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, suggested that it might be worse than a cancer on the Presidency.

I’m referring, of course, to the shocking revelation, contained in an investigative report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, that some lowly I.R.S. officials in a Cincinnati office that deals with applications for tax-free status from philanthropic organizations used words like “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to screen forms for further review. Republican senators and congressmen accused the Obama Administration of using the I.R.S. to intimidate its opponents. Rush Limbaugh spied a White House coverup. The acting head of the I.R.S., Steven Miller, lost his job. Even Jon Stewart flipped his lid.

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Demonizing Edward Snowden: Which Side Are You On?

As I write this, a bunch of reporters are flying from Moscow to Havana on an Aeroflot Airbus 330, but Edward Snowden isn’t sitting among them. His whereabouts are unknown. He might still be in the V.I.P. lounge at Sheremetyevo International Airport. He could have left on another plane. There are even suggestions that he has taken shelter in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow.

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The Bernanke Put: Can the Markets and the Economy Live Without It?

In finance, a “put” is a contract that gives its owner the right to sell something—a stock, a bond, a tanker of crude oil—at certain price, regardless of the price in the market. A put is a guarantee, basically, and when the markets are falling it can be invaluable. But the word is sometimes used in a more general sense.

Back in the old days, when Mark Zuckerberg was in high school and Alan Greenspan was in Foggy Bottom, there was something called “the Greenspan put.” It was a commitment on the part of the Fed to cut interest rates and print money whenever the markets or the economy stumbled. Although its existence was officially denied, many investors believed it was in place, and this belief helped sustain the great stock market bubble of the late nineteen-nineties.

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The Bernanke Put: Will He Really Remove It?

In finance, a “put” is a contract that gives its owner the right to sell something—a stock, a bond, a tanker of crude oil—at certain price, regardless of the price in the market. A put is a guarantee, basically, and when the markets are falling it can be invaluable. But the word is sometimes used in a more general sense.

Back in the old days, when Mark Zuckerberg was in high school and Alan Greenspan was in Foggy Bottom, there was something called “the Greenspan put.” It was a commitment on the part of the Fed to cut interest rates and print money whenever the markets or the economy stumbled. Although its existence was officially denied, many investors believed it was in place, and this belief helped sustain the great stock market bubble of the late nineteen-nineties.

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Google and the N.S.A. Spying Apparatus

“[I]t’s high time that governments get together and decide some rules around this,” David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, said in an online Q. & A. with the Guardian on Wednesday, which addressed the company’s challenge to the blanket secrecy that surrounds the U.S. government’s domestic-spying apparatus. “It’s really important that all of us give close scrutiny to any laws that give governments increased power to sift through user data.” In a motion filed earlier this week with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which approves and denies (mostly approves) the government’s demands for personal information from telephone and Internet companies for national-security purposes, Google argued that it had the right, under the First Amendment, to publish details of the court orders it receives. As well as filing a legal motion in the FISA court, which operates according to its own rules, Google has petitioned the Justice Department for permission to disclose the number of FISA orders it receives, and how many personal accounts are covered under those orders.

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Bernanke Prepares to Step Off the Gas: Why Now?

The Fed chairman Ben Bernanke spooked the markets on Wednesday by confirming that the Federal Reserve is getting ready to draw down its policy of pumping tens of billions of dollars into the bond market each month—a strategy known as quantitative easing. After Bernanke spoke, the Dow closed down about two hundred points and interest rates rose slightly as the bond market sold off.

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The G8, Obama, and Syria: Why Putin Came Out on Top

From the damp, sleepy shores of Lough Erne, where Barack Obama and his fellow Western leaders have just finished up the annual G8 summit, it’s a long way to the bloodstained streets of Aleppo and Homs. But the civil war in Syria dominated the meeting to such an extent that it ended in failure. After two days of talks, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin refused to sign onto a communiqué explicitly calling for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, which is what the other nations wanted.

With Moscow blocking a consensus, the G8 was reduced to releasing a bland communiqué that called for the establishment of “a transitional governing body with full executive powers, formed by mutual consent.” Does that include the consent of Assad and his cronies? After the meeting ended, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said it was “unthinkable” that the Syrian leader would stay in power. But Putin gave up precious little ground. In a closing press conference, he repeated that he was against arming the Syrian opposition, asserted that there was no proof Assad’s regime had used chemical weapons, and compared the rebels to the Islamist extremists who killed a British soldier on the streets of London last month.

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