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.

“There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially “Islamist” terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit, and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography, or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try to place it in a political context, or even to try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Side B believes that, though nothing can ever excuse or justify it, terrorism exists in a particular time, place, and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself.”

- Arundhati Roy -

The Media called it India’s September 11th.  The ratings of 24-hour News channels soared as we were shown disturbing and violent images of a city in flames.  Speculation was immediate and before long a terrorist group with Pakistani ties emerged as the most likely suspect.  After the smoke cleared in Mumbai over 170 people had been murdered, hundreds more were injured, damage was wide spread, and only a single terrorist had been apprehended.

While some would like to oversimplify this attack as Evil terrorists killing innocent Democratic Indians and Westerners, the truth is obviously much more complex.  It is problem with a long history of violence, political interference, and fighting over land and long held religious beliefs.

The article featured in this post was written by Indian novelist/screenwriter/journalist Arundhati Roy and is an honest and wise look at the events of November 26th, 2008 and the actions and policies that led to the brutal attack in Mumbai.  Instead of polarizing the situation and lumping people into good guys and bad guys she takes a historical look at the problem, examining the policies and acts of violence perpetrated by both sides.

Roy sagaciously sees that if we are ever going to truly contain terrorism we must look at the “monster in the mirror”.  Governments (including her own) must begin to acknowledge the policies and bad deeds of decades past that have led to the mess we currently find ourselves in.  She understands that until we examine this “monster in the mirror” and start to understand why - until that happens - we are only going to exacerbate this diffucult and delicate problem.

—-

Via Tomdispatch.com

9 Is Not 11

(And November Isn’t September)
By Arundhati Roy

We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It’s odd how, in the last week of November, thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India’s richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara — one of Kashmir’s most ravaged districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur, and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects in these previous attacks, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something’s going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you might not have heard that ordinary people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness.

The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of “India shining” and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish center.

We’re told that one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That’s absolutely true. It’s an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) said, “Hungry, kya?” (”Hungry eh?”). It, then, with the best of intentions I’m sure, informed its readers that, on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia.

But of course this isn’t that war. That one’s still being fought in the Dalit bastis (settlements) of our villages; on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.

That war isn’t on TV. Yet.

So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.

Still Interested?  Read more here.

Via Salon.com

By Andrew Leonard

Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008 15:33 PST

“You should interview Steven Chu,” the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. “He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis.”

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man’s interests, here’s the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama’s bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever — $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled “Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction,” held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won’t need to be broken — there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity’s energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right down the hill from Chu’s offices above the campus of U.C. Berkeley. There’s also no question that the political climate for biofuels has changed drastically since February 2007.

But for those who bemoaned the Bush administration’s steadfast opposition to taking action on climate change and its criminal abuse of the scientific method, there’s reason to cheer. The sight of a scientist whose professed goal is to combat climate change and wean the U.S. from dependence on oil put in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy is welcome indeed. You could almost call it change.

“TomDispatch is one of the wonders of the electronic age. A touch of the finger and you get the juiciest, meatiest information and analysis, so rich a feast of intelligence and insight I often felt short of breath. Now, Tom Engelhardt has assembled some of the best of his dispatches, from some of the boldest and most astute commentators in the country. So take a deep breath and read.”

- Howard Zinn, author of People’s History of the United States -

Introduction to Mike Davis article written by TomDispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.

From Tomdispatch.com -

No one should be shocked to discover that, in his transition to the presidency, the “inexperienced” former senator from Chicago has turned to the last Democratic administration that had experience in Washington. It seems, however, that the Obama team is doing so big time. Looking at lists of early appointees for the transition period and the administration to come, from Rahm Emanuel on down, you might be forgiven for concluding that Hillary had been elected president in 2008. Clintonistas are just piling up in the prospective corridors of power.

You might also be forgiven for concluding that just about no one else in America had ever had any “experience.” Late last week, the website Politico.com did some counting and came up with the following: “Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices.” More have been appointed since then, including, as White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, the lawyer who defended Bill Clinton in impeachment hearings. And, of course, everyone in America now knows that Hillary herself is evidently now being considered for a cabinet post.

What do Washington political and policy types do when their party is kicked out of office? If they want to stay in the Big Town, they tend to go to work for lobbyists, consultancy firms, or think tanks. They raise money. They do what’s needed and make good livings until the tide turns. Now, that tide is again rushing in — and the lobbying money is, of course, rushing in with it. As the Washington Post describes it, there is already a “mini-boom” for Democrats along that lobbying alley, K Street.

Here’s how Laura Meckler and Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal described one set of 13 transition-team names released: “The group is filled with second-tier veterans of the Clinton administration and workers in the technology and financial sectors. It includes four former lobbyists, three top campaign fund-raisers and two former employees of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, with some overlap among them. Four people in the group have ties to the consultant McKinsey & Co…” (In 2004, by the way, McKinsey & Co. made $19,500 in executive contributions to President Bush, and $102,000 in soft money contributions to the Republican Party. That will undoubtedly now change.)

Obama himself, for those of you who watched him (and Michelle) on 60 Minutes Sunday, is nothing short of a breath of fresh air — he actually explains things coherently — after our last presidential “experience.” But let’s hope that, as the good times roll (even in bad times) for Democrats, he keeps his equilibrium amid the usual Washington consensual pressures. The President-elect spoke Sunday night of keeping people in their all-too-foreclosable homes. Right now, as far as we know, the best he can imagine is a 90-day foreclosure freeze on “some banks.” The plans at the FDIC these days promise to save homeowners by turning 30-year mortgages into 40 years of paying the bank at lower interest rates. Is there no such thing in our world as the economics of kindness (except perhaps for bankers and insurance execs)? What about leaving people in their homes at least until the bad times end? Why is debt forgiveness an option for banks, but not for citizens?

Among all those experienced folks in the new Democratic Washington, will there be anyone who can truly think outside the box in desperate times? Mike Davis, TomDispatch regular and most recently the incandescent author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire, suggests some of the human choices that an Obama administration will face and what might be done about them.

Why Obama’s Futurama Can Wait

Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package

By Mike Davis

America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain’s high-speed rail network will become the world’s largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America.” Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His “Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” vows to “create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we’ll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.”

Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Still interested?  Read more here.

From Salon.com -

BILL AYERS TALKS BACK -

By Walter Shapiro

Nov. 17, 2008 | NEW YORK — Proving yet again that there are indeed second and even third acts in American lives, Bill Ayers had transformed himself over a quarter of a century from an on-the-run-from-the-law member of the Weather Underground to a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But because of a single event — a 1995 coffee that he and his wife gave for fledgling state Senate candidate Barack Obama — Ayers again found himself in the cross hairs of history.

John McCain targeted his rival’s associations with radicals like Ayers, and Sarah Palin hyperbolically accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Ayers rebuffed interview requests throughout the campaign, but has dropped his reticence with the republication of his 2001 book, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist.”

After appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last Friday, Ayers sat down for a 55-minute interview with Salon’s Washington bureau chief, Walter Shapiro. During the late 1960s at the University of Michigan, Shapiro knew Ayers as a “guy in the neighborhood.” The following interview, conducted in Shapiro’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been edited for length.

We had not seen each other in something like 39 years until you walked in. All through the 2008 campaign, I have been telling this story. I ran into you on South University Street in Ann Arbor maybe three or four days before the 1968 convention. And you asked me, “Are you going to Chicago?” And I said, “No, they’re going to nominate Hubert Humphrey.” And you replied, “You’ve got to be there. Great shit’s going to be happening in the streets.”

And you missed it.

Of course, I missed it.

The interesting thing about an event like that or Woodstock …

Which you missed.

Which I did miss, but in a funny way I felt like I was there. Chicago ‘68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I’ve talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock. Interestingly, 24 years from now, everyone will have been in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, because it was another exciting moment when we came together.

Were you there in Grant Park for Obama?

I was there for hours and I couldn’t leave and I’ll tell you why. I’ve been in larger crowds of people before, but I’ve never been in a crowd that large where there was no edge of anger, there was nothing that people were trying to push against, no one was drunk, there was no gluttony. It was simply a gathering of pure joy. Something that would have seemed unimaginable just a couple of years before was now inevitable and unforgettable. Everyone wanted to be there. And the sense of unity and the sense of hope was really palpable and lovely.

So I take it you voted for Barack Obama.

Of course, what were the choices? I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected. And, of course, we have to embrace the moment. It was a moment when the American people overwhelmingly rejected the politics of fear, the politics of war and militarization, paranoia and the acceptance of the shredding of our constitutional rights. It was a sense of “let’s move beyond that.” And so, of course, I wanted to be a part of that, and we need to embrace that. I also think — and this is where we need to move in the future — that we cannot believe that presidents save us. They cannot save our lives. We have to do for ourselves the important work of transformation, the important work of reframing the last eight years, the last several decades, into something more hopeful.

Let’s come back to Obama. I’m curious. How many conversations have you had with him over the years? Fifteen? Twenty?

A dozen or 15 perhaps. There was a big thing made this morning [on "Good Morning America"] that I was coming out of my silence. Nothing could be further from the truth. I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.

But I e-mailed you during the campaign and asked, “Do you want to talk about this?” And you said, “Thanks, great to hear from you, but not at this time.”

Well, what I didn’t want to comment on was the political campaign. I didn’t want to enter into that. The reason is simple: I thought that I was being used as a prop in a very dishonest narrative — and I didn’t want to be part of the narrative and I couldn’t find a way to interrupt it. Anything that I said was going to feed that narrative. So I felt that part of this was the demonization of me — certainly that I’m some kind of toxic agent that has to be feared.

The second thing, and perhaps more important, is that I was being used to try to bring down this promising new leader by the old tactic of guilt by association. The idea that somehow — and this is deep in the American political culture — that if two people share a bus downtown, have a cup of coffee, have several conversations, that somehow means that they share an outlook, a perspective, responsibility for one another’s behavior. And I reject that. That guilt by association is wrong and we shouldn’t buy into it.

Do you feel diminished by Obama repeatedly referring to you throughout the campaign as just some “guy from the neighborhood”?

Not in the least; I am a guy from the neighborhood. And I’m proud of it … And the neighborhood being Hyde Park, which is a very close-knit, very friendly, very politically diverse, very racially diverse. You have all kinds of poles there. You have [conservative] Judge Richard Posner on one pole and Louis Farrakhan on the other. And everything in between. It’s an interesting neighborhood, a college town [the University of Chicago]. It’s close-knit. It’s kind of like Wasilla, Alaska, except that it’s different.

What have your impressions been of Obama over the years?

I met him sometime in the mid-1990s and, as I said, I know him about as well as thousands and thousands of other people do. And like millions of other people, I wish I knew him a lot better now. My impression of him from the start was that this was the smartest person who walks into any room he walks into. An incredibly bright, an incredibly quick person. A compassionate, kind person. And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago. And that’s where my imagination ran out of steam, apparently, because clearly he had his sights on something else and I’m delighted for him and for the country and the world that he was able to accomplish this.

Still Interested? Read more here.

Watch video from the interview below -

Michael Falcone of The New York Times writes - From now on it will be the weekly “Democratic Radio Address” in name only.  President-elect Barack Obama, capitalizing on his successful use of multimedia technologies during the campaign, delivered his message on Saturday using video as well as audio. It may seem like a political no-brainer in the age of YouTube, but as aides to Mr. Obama pointed out, it is a first for a president or president-elect…

Read more here.

“Bloomberg L.P., the parent company of Bloomberg News, said last week that it filed a lawsuit seeking information on the collateral that a group of banks pledged for some $2 trillion in emergency loans from the Federal Reserve. Bloomberg asked a federal court in New York to require the Federal Reserve to disclose the identity of the banks that borrowed money through certain financing mechanisms, and to disclose what assets they pledged against those loans.

Bloomberg filed the suit after the Federal Reserve said that it would deny Bloomberg’s request for the information under the Freedom of Information Act.”

- www.bailoutsleuth.com -

We must have transparency. We have the right to know where our money went.  Our money that is now in the hands of people who at best have proven themselves to be inept and myopic businessmen and at the very worst to be fraudulent, money hungry, con-artists of the highest order.

Let us hope that Bloomberg L.P. prevails in this case and the rights of the people are held above the rights of corporations.

This article was linked to in the preceding post but just in case you missed it here is the full text.

——

Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose (Update2)

By Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

“The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,” said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. “In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.”

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

“It’s your money; it’s not the Fed’s money,” said billionaire Ted Forstmann, senior partner of Forstmann Little & Co. in New York. “Of course there should be transparency.”

Treasury, Fed, Obama

Federal Reserve spokeswoman Michelle Smith declined to comment on the loans or the Bloomberg lawsuit. Treasury spokeswoman Michele Davis didn’t respond to a phone call and an e-mail seeking comment.

President-elect Barack Obama’s economic adviser, Jason Furman, also didn’t respond to an e-mail and a phone call seeking comment from Obama. In a Sept. 22 campaign speech, Obama promised to “make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people’s business.”

The Fed’s lending is significant because the central bank has stepped into a rescue role that was also the purpose of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, bailout plan — without safeguards put into the TARP legislation by Congress.

Total Fed lending topped $2 trillion for the first time last week and has risen by 140 percent, or $1.172 trillion, in the seven weeks since Fed governors relaxed the collateral standards on Sept. 14. The difference includes a $788 billion increase in loans to banks through the Fed and $474 billion in other lending, mostly through the central bank’s purchase of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds.

Sept. 14 Decision

Before Sept. 14, the Fed accepted mostly top-rated government and asset-backed securities as collateral. After that date, the central bank widened standards to accept other kinds of securities, some with lower ratings. The Fed collects interest on all its loans.

The plan to purchase distressed securities through TARP called for buying at the “lowest price that the secretary (of the Treasury) determines to be consistent with the purposes of this Act,” according to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, the law that covers TARP.

The legislation didn’t require any specific method for the purchases beyond saying mechanisms such as auctions or reverse auctions should be used “when appropriate.” In a reverse auction, bidders offer to sell securities at successively lower prices, helping to ensure that the Fed would pay less. The measure also included a five-member oversight board that includes Paulson and Bernanke.

At a Sept. 23 Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington, Paulson called for transparency in the purchase of distressed assets under the TARP program.

`We Need Transparency’

“We need oversight,” Paulson told lawmakers. “We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.”

At a joint House-Senate hearing the next day, Bernanke also stressed the importance of openness in the program. “Transparency is a big issue,” he said.

The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks, which gave the Fed collateral in the form of equities and debt, including subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site. The borrowers have included the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Banks oppose any release of information because it might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group.

Frank Backs Fed

“You have to balance the need for transparency with protecting the public interest,” Talbott said. “Taxpayers have a right to know where their tax dollars are going, but one piece of information standing alone could undermine public confidence in the system.”

The nation’s biggest banks, Citigroup, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, declined to comment on whether they have borrowed money from the Fed. They received $120 billion in capital from the TARP, which was signed into law Oct. 3.

In an interview Nov. 6, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said the Fed’s disclosure is sufficient and that the risk the central bank is taking on is appropriate in the current economic climate. Frank said he has discussed the program with Timothy F. Geithner, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a possible candidate to succeed Paulson as Treasury secretary.

“I talk to Geithner and he was pretty sure that they’re OK,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “If the risk is that the Fed takes a little bit of a haircut, well that’s regrettable.” Such losses would be acceptable, he said, if the program helps revive the economy.

`Unclog the Market’

Frank said the Fed shouldn’t reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of “delicacy with respect to pricing.” He said such disclosure would “give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.” He wouldn’t say why he thought that information would be problematic.

Revealing how the Fed values collateral could help thaw frozen credit markets, said Ron D’Vari, chief executive officer of NewOak Capital LLC in New York and the former head of structured finance at BlackRock Inc.

“I’d love to hear the methodology, how the Fed priced the assets,” D’Vari said. “That would unclog the market very quickly.”

TARP’s $700 billion so far is being used to buy preferred shares in banks to shore up their capital. The program was originally intended to hold banks’ troubled assets while markets were frozen.

AIG Lending

The Bloomberg lawsuit argues that the collateral lists “are central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.”

The Fed has lent at least $81 billion to American International Group Inc., the world’s largest insurer, so that it can pay obligations to banks. AIG today said it received an expanded government rescue package valued at more than $150 billion.

The central bank is also responsible for losses on a $26.8 billion portfolio guaranteed after Bear Stearns Cos. was bought by JPMorgan.

“As a taxpayer, it is absolutely important that we know how they’re lending money and who they’re lending it to,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia- based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Ratings Cuts

Ultimately, the Fed will have to remove some securities held as collateral from some programs because the central bank’s rules call for instruments rated below investment grade to be taken back by the borrower and marked down in value. Losses on those assets could then be written off, partly through the capital recently injected into those banks by the Treasury.

Moody’s Investors Service alone has cut its ratings on 926 mortgage-backed securities worth $42 billion to junk from investment grade since Sept. 14, making them ineligible for collateral on some Fed loans.

The Fed’s collateral “absolutely should be made public,” said Mark Cuban, an activist investor, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team and the creator of the Web site BailoutSleuth.com, which focuses on the secrecy shrouding the Fed’s moves.

The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net; Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at afitzgerald2@bloomberg.net.

The above rain soaked pictures come from a great photo-story posted on The Big Picture Wednesday November 5th.  You can see the rest of the pics by clicking here.

I also highly recommend you check out Photojournalist Scout Tufankjian’s coverage of the entire Barack Obama campaign.  It is a beautiful, thoughtful, and incredibly detailed photographic journey through every step of President-Elect Barack Obama’s (damn does that feel good to type) historic campaign.  Check out the project here.

Lastly I want to direct you to a slideshow from CNN that covers The Grant Park Election Night Rally.  It takes a few key parts from President Obama’s speech and plays it over some phenomenal pictures of the event.  It is an inspiring tribute to the night and to President Obama’s historic speech.  Check out the “Obama: This is our moment” slide show here.

Thank you to Uncle Chest for sending the CNN slide show and Scout Tufankjian’s “Yes We Can” project.

Enjoy!  Be Inspired!

The Big Picture

Thanks to Elvis Dickens for sharing this article -

New York Times Op-Ed

November 3rd

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.  Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.

Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed. The baby boomers, who entered adulthood promising a lifetime of activism, have been a politically undistinguished generation. They produced two presidents, neither of whom lived up to his potential. They remained consumed by the culture war that divided their generation. They pass their political supremacy today having squandered the fat years and the golden opportunities.

Month by month, frustration has mounted. Americans are anxious about their private lives but absolutely disgusted by public leaders. So change is demanded.

Republicans nominated an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue. Many of us regard him — and always will — as one of the heroes of our time. But the public demand for change was total, and if the polls are right, voters will elect the man who breaks from the recent past in almost every way.

Barack Obama is a child of a child of the 1960s. His mother was born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. For people in Obama’s generation, the great disruption had already occurred by the time they hit adulthood. Theirs is a generation of consolidation and neo-traditionalism — a generation of sunscreen and bicycle helmets, more anxious about parenthood than anything else.

Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.

His upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.

And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” “Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.”

In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.