Posts Tagged ‘Obama Administration’

Barack Obama: The Entagled Giant

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Some perspective and a little context.  Read.  Pass along.  Question.

via The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 15 · October 8, 2009

Entangled Giant

By Garry Wills

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that “extraordinary rendition”—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain.[1] Obama’s nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo’s claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to “battlefield law.”[2] On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking “state secrets”—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama’s attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so.[3] Obama refused to release photographs of “enhanced interrogation.” The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.[4]

The President said that past official crimes would not be investigated—certainly not for prosecution, and not even by an impartial “truth commission” just trying to establish a record. He said, on the contrary, that detainees might be tried in “military tribunals.” When the British government, trying a terrorist suspect, decided to use some American documents shared with the British government, Obama’s attorney general pressured it not to do so. Most important, perhaps, was the new president’s desire to end the nation-building in Iraq while substituting a long-term nation-building effort in Afghanistan, run by a government corrupted by drug trafficking and not susceptible to our remolding.

Even in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush’s. Gay military personnel, including those with valuable Arabic-language skills, were being dismissed at the same rate as before. Even more egregiously, the Obama administration continued the defiance of the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, which requires states to recognize laws passed by other states, when it defended the Defense of Marriage Act, which lets states refuse to recognize gay marriages legally obtained in another state. Many objected when Dick Cheney would not name energy executives who came to the White House in 2002, though Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had been forced to reveal which health advisers had visited her. Yet the Obama team, in June 2009, refused to release logs of those who come to the White House. (It later reversed itself, but only in response to a lawsuit.)

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, “Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place.” A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say “estimated” because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales signed a memo written by David Addington that called the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete.” Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Few people even consider anymore Madison’s lapidary pronouncement, “In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief. Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awesome proximity to the Football, to the Button.

Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, “One doesn’t fight in the hope of winning” (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l’espoir du succès).

— September 10, 2009

Notes

[1]Jane Mayer, “The Secret History,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2009.

[2]Charlie Savage, “Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas,” The New York Times, February 18, 2009.

[3]John Schwartz, “Obama Backs Off a Reversal on Secrets,” The New York Times, February 10, 2009. See also my recent discussion of the Reynolds case, “Why the Government Can Legally Lie,” The New York Review, February 12, 2009.

[4]Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman, “Obama Tilts to CIA on Memos,” The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009; R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, “CIA Fights Full Release of Detainee Report,” The Washington Post, June 17, 2009.

[5]See David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). See also the review by Jonathan Freedland, “A Black and Disgraceful Site,” The New York Review, May 28, 2009.

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Naomi Klein: Vote out Larry Summers

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life

By Naomi Klein, Washington Post, April 19, 2009

I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn’t be nice. Just from public life.

The criticisms of President Obama’s chief economic adviser are well known. He’s too close to Wall Street. And he’s a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we’re told we shouldn’t care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.

And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we’ve got.

Brain Bubbles start with an innocuous “whiz kid” moniker in undergrad, which later escalates to “wunderkind.” Next comes the requisite foray as an economic adviser to a small crisis-wracked country, where the kid is declared a “savior.” By 30, our Bubble Boy is tenured and officially a “genius.” By 40, he’s a “guru,” by 50 an “oracle.” After a few drinks: “messiah.”

The superhuman powers bestowed upon these men — and yes, they are all men — shield them from the scrutiny that might have prevented the current crisis. Alan Greenspan’s Brain Bubble allowed him to put the economy at great risk: When he made no sense, people assumed that it was their own fault. Brain Bubbles also formed the key argument Greenspan and Summers used to explain why lawmakers couldn’t regulate the derivatives market: The wizards on Wall Street were too brilliant, their models too complex, for mere mortals to understand.

Back in 1991, Summers argued that the subject of economics was no longer up for debate: The answers had all been found by men like him. “The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering,” he said. “One set of laws works everywhere.” Summers subsequently laid out those laws as the three “-ations”: privatization, stabilization and liberalization. Some “kinds of ideas,” he explained a few years later in a PBS interview, have already become too “passé” for discussion. Like “the idea that a huge spending program is the way to stimulate the economy.”

And that’s the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.

Word is that Summers’s current post may be a pit stop on the way to the big prize, Federal Reserve chairman. That means he could actually make “maestro.”

Mr. President, please: Pop this bubble before it’s too late.

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Restoring Science to Its Proper Place

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Via The Nation by John Nichols

President Obama got a lot of applause for declaring in his inaugural address that he would “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.”

That was uplifting rhetoric, worthy of embrace and encouragement.

But the louder applause should come now, as the president follows through on his promise.

Monday’s decision by Obama to lift the Bush administration’s restrictions on funding embryonic stem cell research represents the word turned to action. And important action it is.

As Wisconsin Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, who represents the campus where pioneering stem-cell research was done, said after the signing ceremony at the White House: “Today those people struggling with debilitating illness and injuries and their families saw a new ray of hope. With a stroke of the pen, President Obama lifted restrictions on funding embryonic stem cell research imposed by President George W. Bush. This revolutionary research, pioneered by Dr. James Thomson and his colleagues on the UW-Madison campus, holds tremendous promise for treating people with spinal cord injuries, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and other serious medical conditions. This executive order also restores science to the independent status it deserves and requires –- free from political interference.”

Baldwin was joined by Dr. Thomson and other UW-Madison scientists to witness what she described as the opening of “this new era in medical research.”

That was certainly how Obama saw it.

“(We) will bring the change that so many scientists and researchers, doctors and innovators, patients and loved ones have hoped for, and fought for, these past eight years: We will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research,” he told a cheering crowd. “We will also vigorously support scientists who pursue this research. And we will aim for America to lead the world in the discoveries it one day may yield.”

For Obama, this was no quiet embrace of science.

He held a signing ceremony designed to make news, and he spoke extensively about what he was doing and why.

“At this moment, the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown, and it should not be overstated. But scientists believe these tiny cells may have the potential to help us understand, and possibly cure, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions: to regenerate a severed spinal cord and lift someone from a wheelchair; to spur insulin production and spare a child from a lifetime of needles; to treat Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease and others that affect millions of Americans and the people who love them,” declared the president.

Obama left no doubt about his belief that government must play a role in the process of discovery, explaining that, “(The) potential will not reveal itself on its own. Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident. They result from painstaking and costly research, from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit, and from a government willing to support that work. From life-saving vaccines, to pioneering cancer treatments, to the sequencing of the human genome — that is the story of scientific progress in America. When government fails to make these investments, opportunities are missed. Promising avenues go unexplored. Some of our best scientists leave for other countries that will sponsor their work. And those countries may surge ahead of ours in the advances that transform our lives.”

The president also made it clear that, unlike his predecessor, he believes that science and morality can mix.

“In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values,” Obama said, referring to President Bush’s ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research and the former administration’s heavy-handed attempts to influence scientific research and debates to fit its ideological prerequisites.

Rejecting Bush’s notion that there is a dichotomy between science and morality, Obama said that, “I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research — and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.”

This is one of those definitional “change we can believe in” moments.

It is appropriate to applaud. But it is not appropriate to relax. There will still be fights over scientific issues — mingled into debates over everything from health care to climate change — and most of them will play out on Capitol Hill. Obama has taken an important first step, but he must back it up by using his bully pulpit, his agenda-setting authority and, if necessary, his veto pen, to assure that science really is restored to its proper place.

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NY Times: Slumdogs Unite!

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Via The NY Times

By Op-Ed Columnist, Frank Rich

February 7th 2009

SOMEDAY historians may look back at Tom Daschle’s flameout as a minor one-car (and chauffeur) accident. But that will depend on whether or not it’s followed by a multi-vehicle pileup that still could come. Even as President Obama refreshingly took responsibility for having “screwed up,” it’s not clear that he fully understands the huge forces that hit his young administration last week.

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Obama was blindsided by the savagery and speed of Daschle’s demise. Conventional wisdom had him surviving the storm. Such is the city’s culture that not a single Republican or Democratic senator called for his withdrawal until the morning of his exit. Membership in the exclusive Senate club, after all, has its privileges. Among Daschle’s more vocal defenders was Bob Dole, who had recruited him to Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm where Dole has served as “special counsel” when not otherwise cashing in on his own Senate years by serving as a pitchman for Pepsi and Viagra.

In New York, editorial pages on both ends of the political spectrum, The Wall Street Journal and The Times, called for Daschle to step down. But not The Washington Post. In a frank expression of the capital’s isolation from the country, it thought Daschle could still soldier on even though “ordinary Americans who pay their taxes may well wonder why Mr. Obama can’t find cabinet secretaries who do the same.”

As Jon Stewart might say, oh those pesky ordinary Americans!

In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

Few articulate this ethical morass better than Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to “close the revolving door” between business and government and end our “two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks.” But his tough new restrictions on lobbyists (already compromised by inexplicable exceptions) and porous plan for salary caps on bailed-out bankers are only a down payment on this promise, even if they are strictly enforced.

The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.

This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary. Washington hands repeatedly observe how “lucky” Geithner was to be the first cabinet nominee with an I.R.S. problem, not the second, and therefore get confirmed by Congress while the getting was good. Whether or not this is “lucky” for him, it is hardly lucky for Obama. Geithner should have left ahead of Daschle.

Now more than ever, the president must inspire confidence and stave off panic. As Friday’s new unemployment figures showed, the economy kept plummeting while Congress postured. Though Obama is a genius at building public support, he is not Jesus and he can’t do it all alone. On Monday, it’s Geithner who will unveil the thorniest piece of the economic recovery plan to date — phase two of a bank rescue. The public face of this inevitably controversial package is now best known as the guy who escaped the tax reckoning that brought Daschle down.

Even before the revelation of his tax delinquency, the new Treasury secretary was a dubious choice to make this pitch. Geithner was present at the creation of the first, ineffectual and opaque bank bailout — TARP, today the most radioactive acronym in American politics. Now the double standard that allowed him to wriggle out of his tax mess is a metaphor for the double standard of the policy he must sell: Most “ordinary Americans” still don’t understand why banks got billions while nothing was done (and still isn’t being done) to bail out those who lost their homes, jobs and retirement savings.

As with Daschle, the political problems caused by Geithner’s tax infraction are secondary to the larger questions raised by his past interaction with the corporations now under his purview. To his credit, Geithner, like Obama, has devoted his career to public service, not buckraking. But he still has not satisfactorily explained why, as president of the New York Fed, he failed in his oversight of the teetering Wall Street institutions. Nor has he told us why, in his first major move in his new job, he secured a waiver from Obama to hire a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Nor, in his confirmation hearings, did he prove any more credible than the Bush Treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson, in explaining why Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail while A.I.G. and Citigroup were spared.

Citigroup had one highly visible asset that Lehman did not: Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who sat passively (though lucratively) in its executive suite as Citi gorged on reckless risk. Geithner, as a Rubin protégé from the Clinton years, might have recused himself from rescuing Citi, which so far has devoured $45 billion in bailout money.

Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.

Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck. Not only did Rubin himself serve on the Obama economic transition team, but two of the transition’s headhunters were Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury and later a Citigroup executive, and James S. Rubin, an investor who is Robert Rubin’s son.

A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman chosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom were contradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred. As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

This is why “Slumdog Millionaire,” which pits a hard-working young man in Mumbai against a corrupt nexus of money and privilege, has become America’s movie of the year. As Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, wrote after Daschle’s fall, Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

The neo-Hoover Republicans in Congress, who think government can put Americans back to work with corporate tax cuts but without any “spending,” are tone deaf to this rage. Obama is not. It’s a good thing he’s getting out of Washington this week to barnstorm the country about the crisis at hand. Once back home, he’s got to make certain that the insiders in his own White House know who’s the boss.

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Robert Kuttner — Memo to Obama: Think Bigger

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Via The Huffington Post -

There are three serious dangers in the debate about the stimulus package. The first is that President Obama will think too small. The second is that he will think too bipartisan. The third is that the public will be swayed by myths, such as the claim that infrastructure spending just takes too long to gear up, or that the deficit is the paramount problem.

The economy is now collapsing at an accelerating rate. With the 2008 job loss at the worst annual level since 1945, and even sound businesses unable to get ordinary credit from a traumatized banking system, this will quickly become a classic downward depression spiral unless government acts at a very large scale, and fast. The GDP probably shrank at a rate of at least five percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and the nosedive will be worse this quarter.

There is simply no good news anywhere in the economy, as the costs of the financial crash keep reverberating. Yet a stimulus in the range of $400 billion a year is less than three percent of GDP. (It’s bizarre that the incoming administration uses two-year numbers. They only make the figure sound too large, rather than too small.)

The reality is that we need additional spending of at least a trillion dollars a year for at least two years. The only encouraging sign is that more and more mainstream economists and Democratic politicians are starting to say that the greater risk is that we will aim too low rather than too high. Even Martin Feldstein, who chaired Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a born-again Keynesian.

My educated guess is that the first stimulus package will be too small, and that as the economy-wide collapse deepens, we will be back for a second one by April or May. That would be a shame. It would be far better to have adequate stimulus now.

The Perils of Post-Partisanship

In the past week, the incoming administration has sounded almost desperate in its eagerness to enlist Republicans. First, Obama offered huge concessions in the form of business tax write-offs. Then he signaled a willingness to negotiate limits on Social Security and Medicare. While it may make some sense to reward businesses for creating jobs or for not cutting them, the idea of allowing corporations to write off more past years’ losses on their current taxes is mainly a reward to the same banks that got us into this mess. Tax cuts should be part of the package, but they should go to working families.

Politically, the likelihood is that the Republicans will take whatever concessions they can get from Obama, and then try to block the spending parts of the package. Obama genuinely hopes to reach across partisan divides–it’s part of his make-up–but he may have to get bloodied a few times before he realizes the folly of this approach. It would be far better for him to draft the stimulus package that he wants and that the country needs than to compromise with implacably opposed Republicans going in.

The fact is that he has a much stronger hand than the Republicans do. Families and businesses, mayors and governors, are hurting in red states as much as they are in blue states. If a trillion-dollar stimulus package is pending before Congress and unemployment is rapidly heading towards double digits, he should dare the Republican leadership to try to block it. In such circumstances, it should not be difficult to peel off the two or three senate Republicans he needs to break a filibuster.

Every reformist president has faced an early test of resolve, usually a partisan one. John Kennedy has to win a fight, by three votes, to enlarge the House Rules committee, which had been a graveyard of liberal legislation. Bill Clinton won his first budget vote, raising taxes on the top two percent, by one vote in the House with Vice President Al Gore breaking a tie in the Senate, and Republicans united in opposition. FDR needed all of his persuasive powers to rally the country and the Congress behind the fifteen great bills of his first hundred days, as did Lyndon Johnson on civil rights.

Nothing would enhance the credibility of the president-elect as much as a decisive win on the stimulus, over the opposition of conservative Republicans. If sensible Republicans want to vote with the new president, more power to them - and to Obama.

But this victory will take all of Obama’s skills of leadership, and then some. He needs to explain to the people why public outlay of this scale is urgently needed, and increase the pressure on Congress to support it. At this point, however, the cause and effect are running the other way. Progressives in Congress are urging Obama to think bigger, and not to cave in to the Republicans in the name of a hollow bipartisanship.

Rep. Barney Frank recently told me, “The said this post-partisan stuff was just for the campaign. I think maybe he believes it.” But Obama is no fool. Post-partisanship will last only until it’s clear that Republicans will try to wreck his presidency–and they will.

Yes, We Can Spend It Well.

The most disabling myth, which you hear over and over again, is that the government can’t competently spend large sums of money fast enough, and will end up building bridges to nowhere. “Infrastructure,” as the main supposed form of public spending, is getting far too much attention, and is being used as a straw man to discourage adequate outlay.

Here is a trillion dollars of stimulus that can take effect instantly, and another trillion that can take effect over the course of eighteen months. For Part I, the only planning process necessary is for government to start writing checks. The estimated costs are approximations:

Part I.

1. Make sure state and local governments don’t lay off a single worker or cut back a single existing program. Approximate Cost: $200 billion. Benefit: big loss to communities and workers is avoided. Capacity of local government to fight recession is enhanced.

2. Add emergency revenue sharing to states and cities by picking up half of the state share of Medicaid, which has suffered drastic cuts in eligibility and coverage. Cost $100 billion. Benefit: states can restore Medicaid benefits to more people and can get some general budget relief.

3. Have government temporarily pay most of the cost of COBRA coverage for laid off people who lose their health insurance, and allow people over age 55 to buy into Medicare. Cost: $100 billion. Benefit: unemployed people keep their health coverage, people in late middle age can buy affordable insurance, while Congress debates out how to get universal health insurance for all.

4. Expand Unemployment Insurance to cover part time workers, extend eligibility period, and increase benefit levels. Cost $50 billion. Benefit: people thrown out of work at a time of rising unemployment get more nearly adequate income support.

5. Roll back tuitions at state universities and community colleges, and increase Pell Grants–contingent on universities not increasing costs to students. Cost: $100 billion.

Benefit: young people spend the recession in college rather than clogging unemployment rolls or graduating with huge debt burdens. Colleges are spared the need to cut programs and lay off people in a recession.

6. Declare a temporary holiday on the worker share of the Social Security tax, and have government make up the loss to the trust fund, contingent on employers not cutting wages. Cost: $450 billion. Benefit: an immediate raise of 6.2 percent for all workers, with the benefit being tilted downward, since moderate income workers pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

Total cost: $1 trillion.

Stimulative Effect: Instant.

So the idea that the government can’t spend adequate sums efficiently or quickly is nonsense. Then, during 2009, state, local, and federal government can begin planning programs that take a little longer to realize, though the rollout could begin by summer 2009 and continue into 2010.

Part II:

7. Continue many of the Part I relief programs into a second year, as economic conditions warrant. Cost: $500 billion. Benefit: the momentum of the overall stimulus is maintained.

8. Use direct federal lending to refinance distressed mortgages, and as necessary reduce the outstanding principal amount. This can begin by mid-2009. Cost: $200 billion of subsidy; most additional debt is eventually repaid. (Roosevelt’s Home Owners Loan Corporation returned a modest profit to the Treasury.) Benefits: some three million at-risk homeowners don’t lose their homes. We finally put a floor under collapsing housing prices. Bondholders and banks that bought toxic mortgage-backed securities realize at least something on their investment, which currently has a market value of zero.

9. Begin planning immediately for a broad range of infrastructure programs, from traditional outlay on roads, bridges and mass transit to spending on 21st century infrastructure such as retrofitting homes, green energy, universal broadband, and smart-grid electricity systems. Spend money on worker training as necessary. Cost: $300 billion. Benefit: a more competitive economy and the generation of millions of domestic good jobs.

Total stimulus is two trillion dollars over two years, or about seven percent of GDP a year. If we spend at this level, we can avoid the worst, and a recovery can begin by 2010. Along the way, we will make life better for a lot of working and middle class people, create (or prevent the destruction of) millions of decently-paying jobs, and rebuild public systems that have gone to ruin.

A secondary benefit is that people start believing in government again. As the economy returns to normal, it should never return to the kind of unequal bubble economy that created the mirage of prosperity in the 1990s and the first part of this decade. Many of these programs should not end after 2010. We need a permanent increase in public outlay to pay for adequate levels of public and social investment. But once the worst of the recession is behind us, the increased spending should be paid for by higher taxes on wealthy people so that the budget can be close to balance over the long term. As the economy returns to broad prosperity, the ratio of public debt to GDP begins declining as it did after World War II.

Will Obama reach for the stars and embrace a program this bold? He may suffer a few partisan defeats first, and he may find himself chasing a deepening depression downward. But my guess is that eventually will get there. Let’s hope that it’s sooner rather than later.

Robert Kuttner is author of “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency,” and co-editor of The American Prospect.

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Obama to Give Order to Close Guantanamo Within First Week of Administration

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Via The Huffington Post -

By LARA JAKES | January 12, 2009 02:59 PM EST | AP

WASHINGTON — Advisers to President-elect Barack Obama say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. That executive order is expected during Obama’s first week on the job _ and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers. Both spoke Monday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Obama’s order will direct his administration to figure out what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held at Guantanamo.

It’s still unlikely the prison would be closed any time soon. Obama last weekend said it would be “a challenge” to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration.

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