woolgathering...

"Some differences cannot be split. Either we are locked in an endless, self-defeating war on terror or we are not."

2009-05-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

[from salon...]

In the shadow of Cheney

Obama could spring America from the dank culture of fear spread by Cheney and Bush. So what's holding him back?

By Gary Kamiya

May. 28, 2009 |

Last week, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama carried on a bizarre, disembodied and deeply dissatisfying debate about national security. In a major speech on May 21, Obama denounced torture, defended his plan to close Guantánamo and blasted the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, saying it "failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions [and] failed to use our values as a compass." One minute later, Cheney -- who had been blasting Obama's national security for weeks -- took to the airwaves to warn that Obama's rejection of torture and his plan to shut down the military prison at Guantánamo were "unwise in the extreme." Accusing Obama of "recklessness wrapped in righteousness," the former vice-president said Obama had made the country less safe.

For the large majority of Obama's supporters who utterly reject the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, the president's speech was disillusioning. Despite his soaring rhetoric about "upholding our most cherished values," Obama proposed eviscerating those values by continuing the Bush policies of military tribunals and indefinite detention. Coming on the heels of the Senate's humiliating 90-6 vote to keep Guantánamo open and forbid transferring any of its inmates to U.S. prisons, Obama's speech was a dispiriting confirmation that the country's leadership is still locked into the same fearful "war on terror" mind-set.

The sad thing is that Obama could have chosen a different path. Yet he clung to establishment positions that his supporters have long rejected. His decisive victory in November proved that America is ready to turn the page on the entire Bush era, from its economic policies to its "war on terror." For an exhausted and disillusioned country, Obama represents hope, and embracing hope means sloughing off fear. Like Cheney, who spent much of his time hiding in an underground bunker, Americans spent the Bush years cowering in a metaphorical cave, terrified that the terrorists were coming to get them. Bush's hyper-aggressive foreign policy, his trashing of civil and legal rights and U.N. conventions, were simply the other face of a craven and debilitating fear.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a dreadful trauma. But that trauma took place almost eight years ago, and a natural and salutary forgetfulness has occurred. One of the virtues of this still-green republic has always been its capacity to quickly recover from setbacks, to refuse to dwell on the past, to constantly remake itself. Of all the American virtues, elasticity is perhaps the most important. In a process as natural as the blossoming of flowers in the spring, Americans are ready to reclaim their courage. And they expect and want their young president to lead them forward.

Obama has tried to lead America out of the shadows of the Bush years. He has projected a calm optimism, a reasoned determination, that is a breath of fresh air after the puerile, bullying bravado of George W. Bush and the dark, croaking counsel of his evil courtier Cheney. And he has said inspiring things about the importance of defending our laws, rights and traditions, even in the face of terrorist threats. But because Obama has failed to directly reject the irrational boogeymen his predecessors whipped up, and because he has continued many of their policies, he has not been able to spring us from their dank culture of fear.

The Guantánamo debacle, in which Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly to reject funds to close it, is just one painful result of Obama's unwillingness to challenge the culture of fear. The Senate was spooked by polls showing that Americans, their paranoia aroused by talk radio demagogues and Fox News hacks, were afraid that terrorists would end up in their backyards. Obama was rightfully criticized for failing to come up with a coherent plan for what to do with the Guantánamo detainees.

But that was not Obama's real problem. His real problem was his failure to forthrightly say that while terrorism remains a threat, its danger has been greatly overblown. Obama needed to tell Americans the truth, which is that no open society can ever be absolutely free from terrorist attacks, and that a society that allows its irrational fear of such attacks to cause it to jettison its laws, freedoms and most cherished traditions has already lost to the terrorists. He needed to say that while we will never forget 9/11, always honor the memory of its victims, and never let our guard down, we cannot allow one attack, no matter how horrific and spectacular, to determine the nature and future of our country. He needed to draw a line in the sand, and tell Americans that while he will do everything in his power to protect them, only fools dream of eternal, perfect safety. In short, he needed to seize the terrorism shibboleth root and branch and pull it out of the ground.

This would not have been easy. Politicians do not generally choose to ask their constituents to accept risks of any kind. Denying death may be mentally unhealthy, but it is de rigueur in politics. And even though the Republican Party is going through a meltdown so grotesque that it makes Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" look like an inspiring tale of personal growth, Democrats continue to be terrified that the right will paint them as "soft on national security."

Above all, there is the very nature of terrorism, which is, well, terrifying. Because it is random, indiscriminate, driven by hatred, and seemingly pointless, terrorism taps into primordial human fears in a way that no other form of violence does. It is a monster that inhabits our collective id. Since 9/11, the word "terrorism" has been a totem, a quasi-religious myth, a nightmarish archetype that occupies the same place in our national imagination that "hell" did for the people of the Middle Ages. "Terrorism" blurs the boundaries of political and personal fear: It represents at once a thoroughly human evil to be hated and fought against, and the impersonal, fatalistic face of death itself. Terrorism is fate with a hideous face, like the White Whale that Ahab hates and tries to kill in Melville's "Moby-Dick." (Indeed, the Bush administration's unwinnable, endless, self-defeating "war on terror" is more than a little reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive quest -- which ends, it is well to remember, with the destruction of his ship and all of its crew save the narrator Ishmael.)

Because terrorism in our national imagination is simultaneously villain and nemesis, human and inhuman, the "war" against terrorism slips into becoming a war not just against fanatical jihadis but against our own death, against the very idea of death. As we accept this, repression of reality and the infantile fantasy of perfect safety -- in other words, cowardice -- become the driving forces of our lives.

This craven position dishonors a country whose troops fought at Valley Forge and Shiloh and Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Hue and Fallujah. It is not worthy of the mighty nation whose diverse people came together 60 years ago to help defeat the most dangerous tyrant in the history of humankind. But it is not an easy one for a politician to oppose. Indeed, the cadaverous Cheney, who has now fully embraced his role as the horrifying shadow of our national soul, is essentially accusing Obama of leading America toward death.

Once the argument is framed in these terms, Obama cannot win. By tacitly accepting Cheney's terms -- by shamefully proposing that we detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without real trials, or by refusing to release photographs of Americans torturing people in their control -- Obama has enabled and encouraged our diffuse national cowardice. The American people will continue to cling to irrational positions, like refusing to put convicted terrorists in supermax penitentiaries from which no one has ever escaped, until Obama puts the threat of terrorism in its correct perspective, removes it from the realm of metaphysics and nightmares and returns it to earth, as the ugly but manageable tactic that it is. The only way for Obama to break out of Cheney's trap is to reject the suppositions it is based on.

Cheney's death-obsessed vision found its ultimate expression in his notorious "1 percent doctrine." As revealed in Ron Suskind's eponymous book, the doctrine held that the U.S. should treat an even 1 percent chance of a terrorist attack as if it were a certainty. This doctrine was directly responsible for America's calamitous behavior in the last eight years. It led to policies and actions -- torture, targeted assassinations, indiscriminate aerial bombing, detention without trial, denial of habeas rights -- that only enrage previously neutral people, increase the number of potential terrorists and threaten our national security.

Which is exactly what al-Qaida and their ilk want. A few fanatical jihadis hiding in caves cannot fatally damage the United States: Only the United States can fatally damage the United States. Under the fearful reign of Bush and Cheney, America went a long way toward becoming a country its own citizens would not recognize. As his May 21 speech showed, Obama clearly realizes that many of the policies pursued by his predecessors are irrational, inhumane, unjust and self-defeating. But he has not repudiated their fundamental error, their misapprehension of the actual threat posed by Islamist terrorists.

Which is why Obama's left hand has consistently undone what his right hand has done. He is by nature a difference-splitter, a position that has its virtues. But some differences cannot be split. Either we are locked in an endless, self-defeating war on terror or we are not. Either our laws, traditions and freedoms are more important than an infantile dream of perfect, eternal safety, or they are not. Either we are clear-sighted enough to realize that different kinds of enemies require different responses and that treating a handful of jihadis as if they were the second coming of Nazi Germany is foolish, or we are not. Either we live in the land of the free or we do not.

In 1933, when the nation was in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. That towering president said, "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

FDR's words gave heart to Americans facing a crisis and a threat far worse than any posed by terrorists today. The country has a new president, and it wants a new direction. It is waiting for him to sound his trumpet.

~lee.

greenwald does it again...

2009-05-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

[from salon...]

THURSDAY MAY 21, 2009 09:22 EDT

Hailing the leader as a War President and the powers that go with it

(updated below)

In a February, 2004 interview with Tim Russert, George Bush provoked much derision by proudly declaring himself to be what he called a "war president." This week, Newsweek's Editor Jon Meacham interviewed Barack Obama, adopted Bush's label and applied it to Obama, asking him:

Can anything get you ready to be a war president?

Nothing excites our media stars more than saluting and fetishizing the President as a "War President" and "Commander-in-Chief" (David Broder today, in his column entitled "Obama in Command": Obama is "continuing, with minor modifications, the policies and practices of his Republican predecessor . . . . Obama's liberal critics are right. He is a different man now. He has learned what it means to be commander in chief"). But isn't the phrase "war president" a complete redundancy when it comes to the U.S.? Which American presidents were not "war presidents"?

Bill Clinton presided over his war in the Balkans and various bombing campaigns in Iraq ("Operation Desert Fox"), Afghanistan and the Sudan; Bush 41 had his war -- the glorious Desert Storm -- against Iraq, which followed his intrepid invasion of Panama; Reagan conducted his various secret wars in Central America and got his direct war glory by invading Grenada and by bombing Libya (heroically taking out the infant of that country's leader); Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were all "war presidents" in Southeast Asia; Truman and Eisenhower both presided over the Korean War and the Cold War. I suppose Jimmy Carter may be one of the very few Presidents to whom the label may not apply, since our military involvement during his four post-Vietnam years was of the indirect kind, though even Carter presided over the attempted military rescue of American hostages in Iran and the peak of the Cold War. And I've omitted far more American military actions from this list than I included.

In any event, the U.S. is, more or less, a nation permanently at war. One can debate whether all or some of our wars are good or not, but what can't be debated is that we fight wars far, far more than any other country -- basically, continuously. That's just a fact. After Bush 41's invasion of Panama, R.W. Apple wrote on the front page of The New York Times that the invasion "constituted a Presidential initiation rite" whereby:

For better or for worse, most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest.

In other words, there's no such thing as an American President who is not a "war President." We never go more than a few years without some kind of a direct war, and are always waging covert and indirect ones. American presidents are inherently "war presidents." We don't really have any other kind. To vest a specific power in a President on the ground that he's a "War President" is to vest that power in presidents generally and permanently.

That's why this media construct that things are different for "war presidents" -- we have to give "war presidents" greater power and leeway; demand less transparency and accept more secrecy; acquiesce to abridgments of civil liberties when "America is at war"; and, coming soon under the Change banner, allow them the right to imprison people indefinitely with no trials even beyond "war zones" -- is so manipulative and misleading. It implies that "America at war" is some sort of unusual and temporary circumstance rather than what it is: our permanent state of affairs. In perfect Orwellian fashion, our allies can easily become our enemies (Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Mujahideen precursors to Al Qaeda) and our enemies can just as easily become our allies (Iraqi Sunnis, Gadaffi), but what never changes is our status as a war-fighting nation.

* * * * *

The decree that a President is a special kind of leader -- a "War President" -- is so pernicious because that becomes the rationale for justifying whatever he wants to do. During the Bush years, one of the most widely held beliefs among progressives and Bush critics -- and, prior to that, among Americans generally -- was the principle that people should be treated and punished by the government as "guilty" only once they have actually been proven to be so in a fair judicial proceeding, not assumed to be guilty based on unproven accusations by political leaders. Yet our entire debate over presidential powers and Guantanamo is now -- still -- premised on the opposite assumption: that the people who Obama wants to keep imprisoned in Guantanamo and elsewhere are Evil and Dangerous Terrorists -- the Worst of the Worst. There's no need for that to be proven in a court for it to be assumed. He's asserted it to be so, and therefore it is, and because we're a country "at war," that's all that is needed.

Since early 2002, the American government has repeated over and over and over that the only people at Guantanamo are Terrorists, the Worst of the Worst, both superhuman and sub-human animals. One U.S. military official famously said that Guantanamo detainees are "people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down." This was all assumed to be true without any need for it to be proven -- the War President, the Commander-in-Chief, decreed it to be so, and thus it was so.

Yet over the years, we've released hundreds of them -- the Worst of the Worst -- because it turned out they were guilty of absolutely nothing. After the Supreme Court, in June of 2008, ruled unconstitutional the U.S. Congress' denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, federal courts that finally reviewed their cases began ruling that there is no credible to support the accusations against many of them. Yet still, most political and media elites -- in both political parties and across the political spectrum -- continue simply to assume that they are Terrorists. Think about what it says about someone who, even in the face of all the evidence of these continuous, false accusations, wants to vest the President with the power to keep people in cages indefinitely without having to prove their guilt, or is willing to simply assume that people we lock up are, by definition, Terrorists.

It doesn't matter how often the Government's accusations about detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere are proven to be lies. It's just mindlessly accepted that whoever the President calls a "Terrorist" is one, and that anyone we are imprisoning with no trial must be deeply guilty of being both Evil and Dangerous. Here's how Brian Williams began his NBC News broadcast last night:

The American people have been told for years that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--Gitmo--is where they house the worst of the worst of those rounded up on the battlefields of this nation's dual wars. Most Americans don't walk around every day, every moment thinking of what conditions are like inside there, but President Obama has decided it must be shut down and those inside must be moved.

In fact, many of them were detained nowhere near "battlefields" -- but rather in their homes or off the street -- but since we're a Nation at War, the Battlefield is everywhere.

Chris Matthews yesterday said that "we [are] gonna have to face the fact that these guys are terrorists, they're going to have to be somewhere, it might as well be Gitmo," and then suggested that we just execute them to get rid of the problem (he wanted to know "why are we being so dainty about it" -- meaning worrying about whether we first prove their guilt before killing them). That was after Saxby Chambliss told Matthews: "We know that the ones left at Guantanamo are the meanest, nastiest killers in the world. They get up everyday thinking about ways to harm Americans." No need for a trial -- we should just take their word for it.

This is what being a "nation at war" and viewing the President as a "War President" --- first and foremost the "Commander-in-Chief" -- does to a country. Fear predominates everything. No government power needs to be limited. Blind faith is placed in presidential judgments, the assessments of the War President go unquestioned. Being in the military means following orders, so when all citizens start viewing the President in military terms -- he's "our" Commander-in-Chief -- that mentality of obedience is the natural by-product.

Most of the people at Guantanamo have now been kept in cages for seven years by the U.S. without any charges or trials of any kind -- based solely on the President's say-so -- and very few people seem particularly bothered by that. It's not really hard to understand why political establishments prefer this state of affairs to be permanent, and why Presidents are so eager to claim the mantle of "War President." What political leaders wouldn't be eager to receive the blind faith and virtually unlimited powers that the title entails?

* * * * *

Obama is speaking today at 10:10 a.m. EST on these matters. If there's something worthwhile to say, I"ll create a separate post as he's speaking.

UPDATE: James Madison, Political Observations, 1795:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded,because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

At least based on what they said, they considered "war Presidents" and "Commander-in-Chief" to be a lamentable, temporary and rare necessity, not an exciting and permanent state of affairs.

~lee.

interesting little thing...

2009-05-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

normally my take is that rush limbaugh, hannity, etc. are the price we pay for living in a free society. nothing you can do about it. but this i found interesting.

[from salon...]

Radio rage

The assassination jokes and "liberal" conspiracy theories on talk radio could be an ominous sign of things to come.

By Camille Paglia

May 13, 2009 | In John Frankenheimer's taut 1964 film, "Seven Days in May," the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appalled at a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, plot a coup d'état to remove the president whom they regard as too soft and naive about the evil of America's enemies. The screenplay by Rod Serling (based on a 1962 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) is filled with passionate lines that seem right out of today's talk radio -- "intellectual dilettantes" versus patriotism; America's loss of "greatness"; the superiority of military experience to civilian judgment and governance.

Troubled by the increasing rancor of political debate in the U.S., I watched a rented copy of "Seven Days in May" last week. Its paranoid mood, partly created by Jerry Goldsmith's eerie, minimalist score, captured exactly what I have been sensing lately. There is something dangerous afoot -- an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives: Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America's identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm. Two days after watching "Seven Days in May," I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

[Listen to Davis below]

How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio? Davis (who is obviously a glib horse's ass) did this stunt very emphatically at a news break at the top of the first hour. It was from there that the Dallas magazine story was evidently picked up by liberal Web sites and disseminated, pressuring CBS to denounce Feherty, who made a public apology. The gravity of this case was unfortunately overshadowed by feisty comedian Wanda Sykes' clumsy jibes at Rush Limbaugh the next night at the Washington Correspondents Dinner. Sykes (who is usually hilarious) was rushed and inept, embarrassing herself and her hosts. But what Mark Davis did, in irresponsibly broadcasting Feherty's vile fantasy, was an inflammatory political act that could goad susceptible minds down the dark road toward "Seven Days in May."

Talk radio has been seething with such intensity since Barack Obama's first week in office that I am finding it very hard to listen to it. How many times do we have to be told the sky is falling? The major talk show hosts, in my opinion, made a strategic error in failing to reset at lower volume after Obama's election. When the default mode is feverish crisis pitch, there's nowhere to go, and monotony sets in. Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium. I want stimulation and expansion of my thinking -- not shrill, numbing hectoring and partisan undermining of the authority and dignity of the presidency. Rabidly Bush-bashing Democrats shouldn't have done it to the last president either, but that's no excuse for conservatives, who claim to revere our institutions, to play schoolyard tit for tat.

Not that Obama's policies and conduct shouldn't receive sharp scrutiny. Despite my disgust at the grotesquely bloated stimulus package which did severe early damage to this administration, I am generally happy with Obama's eagerness to tackle long-entrenched social problems, although there is sometimes a curious disconnect between what he says and what he does. The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen. But it's about time an ambitious young leader shook up the stale status quo. The sepulchral, doom-obsessed and megalomaniacal Dick Cheney's self-intrusion into the news last weekend was a nice demonstration of just what a fresh new breeze Obama represents in Washington.

~lee.

re: torture...

2009-04-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

[from daily kos...]

What We Know So Far: A Torture Timeline (Updated)

by DanK Is Back

Thu Apr 23, 2009 at 09:38:04 PM PDT

(From the diaries. An incredible and valuable resource. Susan)

So I thought it would be helpful to put together a timeline of known facts, reports and claims to try to give some chronological perspective to it all. As with any such collection, the selections are somewhat subjective, but I have tried to be fair (but not balanced; this isn't a sporting event) in including what is known, admitted or reasonably validated. And - for once - I will leave speculation to the comments.

It turns out there is so much information already known that just summarizing it is torture. The timeline thus focuses mainly on the torture memos themselves and the events occurring at the time they were written, tested and replaced.

[Updated] Updated to include some of the Bush administration denials, and the Red Cross report.
[Update] Include John Bolton's letter opting out of the ICC; spelling corrections.

Aug-early Sep 2001 Concerned that the administration is not giving terrorism high priority, NSC counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke increasingly pressures NSA Condoleeza Rice to set up a meeting with President Bush. In testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Rice will dispute Clarke's version of events. (Wall St Journal Summary of Rice, Clarke testiomny [PDF])

11 Sep 2001 Terrorists using three highjacked airplanes attack and destroy the World Trade Center, and damage the Pentagon. A fourth plane was also highjacked and was heading toward Washington, DC, possibly with the Capitol as its target, but was brought down by passengers would fought the highjackers and succeeding in crashing the plane in western Pennsylvania. After first denying involvement, Osama bin Laden will release a broadcast on 29 Oct 2004 in which he admits he and Al-Qaeda plotted the attacks.

12 Sep 2001 At a White House meeting, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld urges the bombing of Iraq in response to the WTC attack. Clarke tells him "they were certain al-Qa'ida was to blame and there was no hint of Iraqi involvement."

15 Sep 2001 At a meeting in the White House Situation Room, Bush takes Clarke aside and demands to know if there is a connection between the terror attacks and Saddam Hussein:

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.' "CBS News 60 Minutes 21 Mar 2004

16 Sep 2001 In an interview on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney hints strongly that the administration will consider using torture:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

11 Oct 2001 Former CIA Director James Woolsey is sent to England "in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks...."

December 2001 "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh is captured in Afghanistan. Lindh, an American citizen, was pictured blindfolded, duct-taped naked to a board.... in what is probably the first recorded instance of torture of a detainee under the Bush administration. (Hat tip to Jesselyn Radack.)

January 2002James Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist, and Bruce Jessen, the senior SERE psychologist at the agency, drafted a paper on "al-Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance." WaPo 22 Apr 2009, analyzing the Senate ASC report

9 Jan 2002 John Yoo writes a memo (PDF) stating that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda members.

25 Jan 2002 White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez accepts Yoo's argument, saying that the new war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." SoS Colin Powell and the JAG object to this interpretation, but their objections are ignored.

2 Feb 2002 William Howard Taft IV, the State Dept's legal adviser, sends Gonzales a memo (PDF) saying that the Geneva Convention does apply to captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and that rejecting the convention's protections could have serious policy consequences.

7 Feb 2002 Bush signs a memorandum stating the Article 3 protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

13 Feb 2002 Bush has decided to overthrow Hussein.

28 March 2002 Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al-Qaeda official, is arrested in Pakistan and brought to the United States for interrogation. Ali Soufan, a supervisory special FBI agent, and a second agent, with CIA agents watching, use traditional interrogation methods to question him from March through June 2002, and learn that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was the mastermind of the 11 September attacks.

Spring 2002 Senior officials begin studying how to use SERE techniques in prisoner interrogations. SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY 12 Dec 2008 In April, the CIA begins videotaping interrogation sessions, some of which apparently include waterboarding. It is not yet clear whether Zubaydeh was among those waterboarded at that time. The tapes have all been reported destroyed.

6 May 2002 John Bolton, at that time Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, formally informs the UN that the US "does not intend to become a party to the treaty [establishing the International Criminal Court]."

May 2002 Condoleeza Rice and "other top Bush administration officials" are briefed about "alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding." In July, Rice tells CIA Director George Tenet he can proceed to use these techniques.

23 Jul 2002 Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), reports to Prime Minister Tony Blair on his recent meeting with his counterparts in Washington:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The Downing Street Memo (Emphasis added)

1 Aug 2002 Assistant Attorney General Jay Baybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, issues a memorandum to the CIA telling them that "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding do not, in the OLC's opinion, constitute torture.

August 2002 Abu Zubaydeh is subjected to waterboarding at least 83 times. A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who interrogated Zubaydeh (but who did not witness any of the waterboarding says that "it took only 35 seconds once the technique was employed for Zubaydah to start talking." Kiriakou says that it was torture, but it was necessary. He does not appear to be aware of the multiple waterboardings.

(Note: Kiriakou's claim that that Zubaydeh had refused to cooperate prior to the (first) waterboarding is contradicted by FBI agent Ali Soufan's report that Zubaydeh had been cooperating for months; see above. It's also not clear (yet) whether Zubaydeh was waterboarded or otherwise tortured during the period when Soufan was interrogating him for the FBI.)

August 2002 FBI officials are so concerned about the CIA's interrogation of Zubaydeh that they have a meeting with FBI Director Robert Mueller to discuss it. Mueller decides that the FBI will no longer participate in the interrogation, which he later extends as a "bright line rule" applying to all CIA interrogations of detainees.

11 Oct 2002 The commander at GTMO requests permission to use "aggressive interrogation techniques."

2 Dec 2002 Rumsfeld signs a memo authorizing 15 specific "aggressive techniques." The Senate report notes that interrogations using these techniques (including sleep deprivation) actually started on 23 Nov 2002, a week before Rumsfeld gave his approval of them.

29 Dec 2002 The US military issued a statement denying stories that its prisoners in Afghanistan were being tortured, or that the CIA had a secret base there.

2002-03 generally Administration officials, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld, pressure the CIA to come up with a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said. McClatchy 21 Apr 2009

3 Mar 2003 US officials report that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) has been arrested in Pakistan and transferred to US custody for questioning. KSM is subjected to waterboarding, [winning] the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess. It is later revealed that KSM was waterboarded "183 times during March 2003...."

20 Mar 2003 The invasion of Iraq begins. On 1 May, Bush announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." He adds: "And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more."

No weapons of mass destruction are ever found in Iraq.

14 May 2003 John Yoo wrties a second memo which basically says the president can do anything he wants in time of war:

[F]ederal criminal laws of general applicability do not apply to properly~authorized interrogations of enemy combatants, undertaken by military personnel in the course of an armed conflict. Such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's. grant of the Commander in Chief power solely to the President. Yoo memo PDF

14 Dec 2003 Saddam Hussein is captured. Although news stories at the time report that he was found in a hole in the ground after "torture lite" of captured bodyguards, later reports tell a different story, including that Saddam was captured by Kurds, who drugged him and turned him over to US authorities.

April 2004 The Abu Ghraib scandal breaks.

13 May 2004 The BBC posts one of the early stories suggesting the CIA is using "brutal" interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.

June 2004 Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith orders both Yoo memos withdrawn. He directs Daniel Levin in the OLC to write a new memo. That same month, Goldsmith is forced by pressure from the White House and from Cheney counsel David Addington to resign.

23 Jun 2004 In response to the revelation of the 2002 Yoo/Bybee memo, DoJ disavows the memo. Bush denies ordering prisoners at GTMO tortured. "Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture."

28 Jun 2004 The Supreme Court rules in Hamdi v Rumsfeld that detainees at GTMO were entitled to legal due process, rejecting the administration's claim of expansive executive powers in wartime.

7 Jul 2004 Alberto Mora, general counsel for the US Navy, writes a memo (PDF) summarizing the history to date of abuse of detainees at GTMO and his office's attempts to stop it. The memo dismisses the legal arguments in Yoo's memos. Mora's memo is buried and he is forced to retire. (See this New Yorker article of 27 Feb 2006 for more on the Mora saga.)

30 Dec 2004 The OLC publishes Daniel Levin's memo, stating that:

Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms. This universal repudiation of torture is reflected in our criminal law....

There is no exception under the statute permitting torture to be used
for a "good reason." Thus, a defendant's motive (to protect national security, for example) is not relevant to the question whether he has acted with the requisite specific intent under the statute. Memorandum by Daniel Levin (PDF)

Levin's memo replaces the Yoo memos. There is a report that Gonzalez, who was about to take over as Attorney General, blocked Levin from finishing a second memo which would have examined specific techniques, including waterboarding, to determine if they fell within the definition of torture.

10 May 2005 Steven Bradbury of the OLC issues a new memo (PDF)m, which, apparently, finish the job Levin was not allowed to do, and from what I can see replaces Levin's December 2004. In it, he finds that

although extended sleep deprivation and use of the waterboard present more substantial questions in certain respect under the statute and the use of the waterboard raises the most substantial issue-none of these specific techniques, considered individually, would violate the prohibition [against torture]."

Bradbury issues two other memos in May (PDF and PDF) further providing legal cover. But it seems clear from the timeline that in the period of June 2004, when the Yoo memos were rescinded, and certainly from December 2004 with the Levin memo, until May 2005, the issuance of the Bradbury memos, there was no legal cover from OLC allowing torture. When the existence (though not the actual content) of the Bradbury memos became known in October 2007, Dana Perino, Bush's spokesperson, denied that any torture was taking place or that the Levin memo had been rescinded.

June 2005 Philip Zelikow, legal adviser to now-SoS Rice, writes a memo in which he takes issue with each of the justifications offered by the Bradbury memos. The Bush White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of the memo.

18 Nov 2005 ABC News learns about, and reports on, some of the specific CIA interrogation techniques being used, including waterboarding and also rendition to third-party countries. The CIA declines to comment.

26 Jan 2006 Bush insists Americans are not allowed to torture. "No American will be allowed to torture another human being anywhere in the world...."

23 May 2006 US rejects charges by Amnesty International that it is torturing prisoners at GTMO.

26 Sep 2006 The Senate passes the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which approves torture for detainees, in effect reversing Hamdan. Then-Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech on the Senate floor in which he accused his colleagues of cutting corners and betraying American values.

September 2006 The International Committee of the Red Cross visits Guantanamo and conducts unsupervised interviews with 14 "high-value" detainees.

25 Oct 2006 In a radio interview, VP Dick Cheney "endorses" waterboarding of teror suspects, calling it a "no-brainer."

28 Oct 2006 Bush denies that Cheney meant waterboarding or any similar technique, saying "This country doesn’t torture, we’re not going to torture."

14 Feb 2007 The Red Cross delivers to the Bush administration its report detailing torture of prisoners at GTMO. In keeping with standard Red Cross practice, it keeps the report (PDF) confidential until it is leaked by an unknown source in March 2009, though information in the report does make its way into Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side (New York Times 11 Jul 2008).

6 Oct 2007 Bush defends CIA tactics, saying its methods are necessary and legal and do not constitute torture.

22 Jan 2009 On his second full day in office, President Barack Obama issues an executive order requiring that treatment and interrogation of all detainees be in accord Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions - in other words, no more torture.

2 Mar 2009 President Obama orders the release of several previously classified memos, including the Yoo and Bybee memos, but not the 2005 Bradbury memos.

17 Apr 2009 As ordered by President Obama, DoJ releases copies of the Bradbury memos.

~lee.

i have found the best thing that the internet has ever produced...

2009-04-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

~lee.

it is really fucking hot in my house...

2009-04-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

[from the new york times...]

The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

By FRANK RICH

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism.

The actors are supposedly Not Gay. They stand in choral formation before a backdrop of menacing clouds and cheesy lightning effects. “The winds are strong,” says a white man to the accompaniment of ominous music. “And I am afraid,” a young black woman chimes in. “Those advocates want to change the way I live,” says a white woman. But just when all seems lost, the sun breaks through and a smiling black man announces that “a rainbow coalition” is “coming together in love” to save America from the apocalypse of same-sex marriage. It’s the swiftest rescue of Western civilization since the heyday of the ambiguously gay duo Batman and Robin.

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.

“Gathering Storm” was produced and broadcast — for a claimed $1.5 million — by an outfit called the National Organization for Marriage. This “national organization,” formed in 2007, is a fund-raising and propaganda-spewing Web site fronted by the right-wing Princeton University professor Robert George and the columnist Maggie Gallagher, who was famously caught receiving taxpayers’ money to promote Bush administration “marriage initiatives.” Until last month, half of the six board members (including George) had some past or present affiliation with Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. (One of them, the son of one of the 12 apostles in the Mormon church hierarchy, recently stepped down.)

Even the anti-Obama “tea parties” flogged by Fox News last week had wider genuine grass-roots support than this so-called national organization. Beyond Princeton, most straight citizens merely shrugged as gay families celebrated in Iowa and Vermont. There was no mass backlash. At ABC and CBS, the Vermont headlines didn’t even make the evening news.

On the right, the restrained response was striking. Fox barely mentioned the subject; its rising-star demagogue, Glenn Beck, while still dismissing same-sex marriage, went so far as to “celebrate what happened in Vermont” because “instead of the courts making a decision, the people did.” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the self-help media star once notorious for portraying homosexuality as “a biological error” and a gateway to pedophilia, told CNN’s Larry King that she now views committed gay relationships as “a beautiful thing and a healthy thing.” In The New York Post, the invariably witty and invariably conservative writer Kyle Smith demolished a Maggie Gallagher screed published in National Review and wondered whether her errant arguments against gay equality were “something else in disguise.”

More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren, the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his appearance at the Obama inaugural. Warren also dropped in on Larry King to declare that he had “never” been and “never will be” an “anti-gay-marriage activist.” This was an unmistakable slap at the National Organization for Marriage, which lavished far more money on Proposition 8 than even James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.

The Obamas’ dog had longer legs on cable than the news from Iowa and Vermont. CNN’s weekly press critique, “Reliable Sources,” inquired why. The gay blogger John Aravosis suggested that many Americans are more worried about their mortgages than their neighbors’ private lives. Besides, Aravosis said, there are “only so many news stories you can do showing guys in tuxes.”

As the polls attest, the majority of Americans who support civil unions for gay couples has been steadily growing. Younger voters are fine with marriage. Generational changeover will seal the deal. Crunching all the numbers, the poll maven Nate Silver sees same-sex marriage achieving majority support “at some point in the 2010s.”

Iowa and Vermont were the tipping point because they struck down the right’s two major arguments against marriage equality. The unanimous ruling of the seven-member Iowa Supreme Court proved that the issue is not merely a bicoastal fad. The decision, written by Mark Cady, a Republican appointee, was particularly articulate in explaining that a state’s legalization of same-sex marriage has no effect on marriage as practiced by religions. “The only difference,” the judge wrote, is that “civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”

Some opponents grumbled anyway, reviving their perennial complaint, dating back to Brown v. Board of Education, about activist judges. But the judiciary has long played a leading role in sticking up for the civil rights of minorities so they’re not held hostage to a majority vote. Even if the judiciary-overreach argument had merit, it was still moot in Vermont, where the State Legislature, not a court, voted to make same-sex marriage legal and then voted to override the Republican governor’s veto.

As the case against equal rights for gay families gets harder and harder to argue on any nonreligious or legal grounds, no wonder so many conservatives are dropping the cause. And if Fox News and Rick Warren won’t lead the charge on same-sex marriage, who on the national stage will take their place? The only enthusiastic contenders seem to be Republicans contemplating presidential runs in 2012. As Rich Tafel, the former president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, pointed out to me last week, what Iowa giveth to the Democrats, Iowa taketh away from his own party. As the first stop in the primary process, the Iowa caucuses provided a crucial boost to Barack Obama’s victorious and inclusive Democratic campaign in 2008. But on the G.O.P. side, the caucuses tilt toward the exclusionary hard right.

In 2008, 60 percent of Iowa’s Republican caucus voters were evangelical Christians. Mike Huckabee won. That’s the hurdle facing the party’s contenders in 2012, which is why Romney, Palin and Gingrich are now all more vehement anti-same-sex-marriage activists than Rick Warren. Palin even broke with John McCain on the issue during their campaign, supporting the federal marriage amendment that he rejects. This month, even as the father of Palin’s out-of-wedlock grandson challenged her own family values and veracity, she nominated as Alaskan attorney general a man who has called gay people “degenerates.” Such homophobia didn’t even play in Alaska — the State Legislature voted the nominee down — and will doom Republicans like Palin in national elections.

One G.O.P. politician who understands this is the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, who on Friday urged his party to join him in endorsing same-sex marriage. Another is Jon Huntsman Jr., the governor of Utah, who in February endorsed civil unions for gay couples, a position seemingly indistinguishable from Obama’s. Huntsman is not some left-coast Hollywood Republican. He’s a Mormon presiding over what Gallup ranks as the reddest state in the country.

“We must embrace all citizens as equals,” Huntsman told me in an interview last week. “I’ve always stood tall on this.” Has he been hurt by his position? Not remotely. “A lot of people gave the issue more scrutiny after it became the topic of the week,” he said, and started to see it “in human terms.” Letters, calls, polls and conversations with voters around the state all confirmed to him that opinion has “shifted quite substantially” toward his point of view. Huntsman’s approval rating now stands at 84 percent.

He believes that social issues should not be a priority for Republicans in any case during an economic crisis. He also is an outspoken foe of the “nativist language” that has marked the G.O.P. of late. Huntsman doesn’t share “the view of some” that “the party was created in 1980.” He yearns for it to reclaim Lincoln’s faith in “individual dignity.”

As marital equality haltingly but inexorably spreads state by state for gay Americans in the years to come, Utah will hardly be in the lead to follow Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. But the fact that it too is taking its first steps down that road is extraordinary. It is justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid.

~lee.

this is my easter present to everyone...

2009-04-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

[from salon...]

America is not a Christian nation

Religious conservatives argue the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Judeo-Christian country. But President Obama is right when he says it isn't.

By Michael Lind

Apr. 14, 2009 |

Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Predictably, Obama's remarks have enraged conservative talking heads. But Obama's observations have ample precedent in American diplomacy and constitutional thought. The most striking is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797. Article 11 states: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Conservatives who claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" sometimes dismiss the Treaty of Tripoli because it was authored by the U.S. diplomat Joel Barlow, an Enlightenment freethinker. Well, then, how about the tenth president, John Tyler, in an 1843 letter: "The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions."

Was Tyler too minor a president to be considered an authority on whether the U.S. is a Christian republic or not? Here's George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790: "The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy -- a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support ... May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants -- while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Eloquent as he is, Barack Obama could not have put it better.

Contrast this with John McCain's interview with Beliefnet during the 2008 presidential campaign: "But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'" Asked whether this would rule out a Muslim candidate for the presidency, McCain answered, "But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is a Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would -- I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead."

Conservatives who, like McCain, assert that the U.S. is in some sense a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation tend to make one of four arguments. The first is anthropological: The majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, even though the number of voters who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 5.3 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. But the ratio of Christians to non-Christians in American society as a whole is irrelevant to the question of whether American government is Christian.

The second argument is that the constitution itself is somehow Christian in character. On that point, candidate McCain said: "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation." Is McCain right? Is the U.S. a Christian republic in the sense that according to their constitutions Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are all now officially Islamic republics? What does the Constitution say? Article VI states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States." Then there is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... "

True, over the years since the founding, Christian nationalists have won a few victories -- inserting "In God We Trust" on our money during the Civil War in 1863, adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War in 1954. And there are legislative and military chaplains and ceremonial days of thanksgiving. But these are pretty feeble foundations on which to claim that the U.S. is a Christian republic. ("Judeo-Christian" is a weaselly term used by Christian nationalists to avoid offending Jews; it should be translated as "Christian.")

The third argument holds that while the U.S. government itself may not be formally Christian, the Lockean natural rights theory on which American republicanism rests is supported, in its turn, by Christian theology. Jefferson summarized Lockean natural rights liberalism in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …" Many conservatives assert that to be a good Lockean natural nights liberal, one must believe that the Creator who is endowing these rights is the personal God of the Abrahamic religions.

This conflation of Christianity and natural rights liberalism helps to explain one of John McCain's more muddled answers in his Beliefnet interview: "[The] United States of America was founded on the values of Judeo-Christian values [sic], which were translated by our founding fathers which is basically the rights of human dignity and human rights." The same idea lies behind then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement to religious broadcasters: "Civilized individuals, Christians, Jews and Muslims" -- sorry, Hindus and Buddhists! -- "all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."

In reality, neither Jewish nor Christian traditions know anything of the ideas of natural rights and social contract found in Hobbes, Gassendi and Locke. That's because those ideas were inspired by themes found in non-Christian Greek and Roman philosophy. Ideas of the social contract were anticipated in the fourth and fifth centuries BC by the sophists Glaucon and Lycophron, according to Plato and Aristotle, and by Epicurus, who banished divine activity from a universe explained by natural forces and taught that justice is an agreement among people neither to harm nor be harmed. The idea that all human beings are equal by nature also comes from the Greek sophists and was planted by the Roman jurist Ulpian in Roman law: "quod ad ius naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt" -- according to the law of nature, all human beings are equal.

Desperate to obscure the actual intellectual roots of the Declaration of Independence in Greek philosophy and Roman law, Christian apologists have sought to identify the "Creator" who endows everyone with unalienable rights with the revealed, personal God of Moses and Jesus. But a few sentences earlier, the Declaration refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Adherents of natural rights liberalism often have dropped "Nature's God" and relied solely on "Nature" as the source of natural rights.

In any event, in order to be a good American citizen one need not subscribe to Lockean liberalism. Jefferson, a Lockean liberal himself, did not impose any philosophical or religious test on good citizenship. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he wrote: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

The fourth and final argument made in favor of a "Christian America" by religious conservatives is the best-grounded in history but also the weakest. They point out that American leaders from the founders to the present have seen a role for otherwise privatized and personal religion in turning out moral, law-abiding citizens. As George Washington wrote in his 1796 Farewell Address:

"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them."

In Washington's day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world's stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the "Judeo-Christian tradition" has never been part of the majority culture.

The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were -- religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic. Washington's instrumental view of religion as a kind of prop was agreeable to another two-term American president more than a century and a half later. "[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith," said Dwight Eisenhower, "and I don't care what it is." And it's indistinguishable from Edward Gibbon's description of Roman religion in his famous multi-volume "Decline and Fall": "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."

President Obama, then, is right. The American republic, as distinct from the American population, is not post-Christian because it was never Christian. In the president's words: "We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." And for that we should thank the gods. All 20 of them.

~lee.

great review of one of the best albums ever...

2009-04-05T15:58:00.001-07:00

[from pitchfork...]

Album Review

Pearl Jam
Ten: Deluxe Edition

Ten may be classic rock today, but it's easy to underestimate how radical Pearl Jam sounded back in 1991, even with Nirvana ascendant. After several long years of hair metal dominance, here was a band that could jam stadium-large, texture their sound darkly and densely, and explode the blues-rock template. Here was a frontman with an entirely new stage presence, whose voice strained hard for sincerity and whose songwriting expressed grave self-reckoning without resorting to easy sentiments or self-glorifying choruses. Against the odds-- as well as against the band's wishes, apparently-- their debut became a phenomenon, an alt-rock figurehead as crucial as Nevermind in ushering in and defining the parameters for mainstream rock. Vedder's self-doubts ran as deep as Cobain's, but he expressed them bluntly and directly rather than poetically and obscurely. Oh and also, he's still alive.

Deeply invested in the cathartic possibilities of punk and classic rock, Pearl Jam seemingly made music as a form of self-therapy, an idea that took hold with nearly a decade of alt-rock acts to come. The band is routinely blamed for the self-gratifying Stone Temple Pilots, Creeds, and Nicklebacks that followed Ten, but the band naturally never set out to remake rock music in its own image. Suspicious of the hedonism of the arena rock that preceded them, Pearl Jam were a solemn band, and Ten sounds nothing if not entirely serious about animating Vedder's self-doubts. At times, it's a bit overwrought ("I don't question our existence/ I just question our modern needs"), but the earnestness with which Vedder sang and the band played these songs belies the decade's reputation as a period of pervasive irony. Ultimately, the 1990s wouldn't have been so bad if Pearl Jam's followers hadn't aped their self-seriousness so relentlessly.

Nevertheless, Ten remains impressive and occasionally moving 18 years later, even gentrified with a shiny reissue. The public perception of the album is watered down thanks mainly to the excision of "Alive", "Jeremy", and "Even Flow" as singles. The latter two may be the album's least remarkable tracks: "Jeremy" is the most pat Freudian psychodrama on an album full of them, and "Evenflow" romanticizes homelessness as spiritually transcendent. But "Alive" remains potent not only because Vedder touches on some seriously transgressive shit here (dead fathers, hints at incest, survivor guilt), but mostly because the band rock the hell out of that coda.

Today, Ten lives and dies by its album tracks, and while there are a few clunkers, most are pretty ballsy in their disdain for expectations. Granted, as a new band with few realistic prospects for the kind of success they quickly achieved, Pearl Jam were working with a very different set of expectations than the ones retroactively assigned to them. On songs like "Once", with its insistent breakdowns, and "Black", with strangely dramatic vocalizations, there's a hardscrabble dynamic that the band would be unable to capture on subsequent releases. "Why Go" is ferocious in its outrage, with Vedder delivering his most pained vocals, and Stone Gossard and Mike McCready match him on every song, translating Vedder's howls into messy, edge-of-the-precipice solos and paint-peeling riffs like the one that anchors "Deep".

In addition to the original album as produced by Rick Parashar and mixed by Tim Palmer, the new reissue includes a second disc, titled Ten Redux, that includes a new mix by Brendan O'Brien. A few of these new versions appeared on 2004's best-of Rearviewmirror, and O'Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam on most of their subsequent albums, brings Vedder's ad libs to the forefront, sharpens some of the guitar riffs, and generally cleans up the murkiness. Sounding like 2005 rather than 1991, Ten Redux misses the point: The album's murkiness was one of its chief attractions, its flawed spontaneity feeding the songs' of-the-moment intensity. Ultimately, these new versions have less to do with Pearl Jam's music than with O'Brien's superfandom.

Ten Redux closes with a paltry six bonus tracks. "2,000 Mile Blues" is atrocious Jimi worship, "Evil Little Goat" is Vedder's best Jim Morrison impersonation, and neither "Breath" (here retitled "Breath and a Scream") nor "State of Love and Trust" sound as vital here as they did on the Singles soundtrack. These tracks are obviously intended not to overlap with 2003's Lost Dogs: Rarities and B-Sides, but flipsides like "Dirty Frank" and "Yellow Ledbetter" were surprisingly popular satellites orbiting Ten, played often on radio stations that didn't typically delve that deep into any artist's catalog and shouted at concerts by fans who weren't that fanatic. Their absence limits the reissue, creating an incomplete portrait of the band in its earliest days.

Ten deserved better than Ten Redux and the paltry bonus tracks. Fortunately, the reissue also includes a DVD of Pearl Jam's 1992 performance on "MTV Unplugged". The fashions are of course dated (nice fuzzy hat, Jeff Ament) and Vedder's stool-bound intensity can be fairly ridiculous, but the DVD is a useful and entertaining document of their intense live sets. Thanks to the tight rhythms of drummer Dave Abbruzzese and bass player Ament, the songs lose little of their momentum in this setting, which handily showcases the guitar interplay between Gossard and McCready. But this is Vedder's show-- a live, public debut for his idiosyncrasies. Taking the stage in a tight jacket and backwards baseball cap, he gradually unleashes himself during the show, first letting his hair down and then eventually losing the jacket. By show's end, he's balancing precariously on his stool and scrawling PRO CHOICE!!! on his arms with a Sharpie. Pearl Jam may have shunned the spotlight, but they were born showmen.

— Stephen M. Deusner, April 3, 2009

~lee.

for better or worse i am becoming kind of obsessed with mr. taibbi...

2009-03-31T22:16:00.000-07:00

[from rolling stone...]

Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He'd Give

W. comes clean - on his dad, Condi's farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Jan 22, 2009 11:45 PM

Despite a financial crisis for the ages, the catastrophic collapse of a Republican Party crippled by his political legacy, and the highest presidential disapproval rating in the history of American polling, outgoing commander in chief George W. Bush has not completely lost his sense of fun. When Rolling Stone caught up with him at the White House shortly after the holidays for what would turn out to be his final extended sit-down interview as president, the graying but still quite fit Texan had just finished his morning exercycle session in an eagle-emblazoned sweatsuit and was fiddling with a new toy.

"They call it a Wii, or a Mee, or something," Bush tells me, smiling as he waves a wandlike plastic device in front of a 54-inch plasma TV in the Treaty Room, a large, brightly lit chamber on the second floor of the Executive Residence that traditionally functions as the president's private study. The president is playing a friendly game of Major League Baseball — the Boston Red Sox against his cherished Texas Rangers — and a computer-rendered Daisuke Matsuzaka drills a hard slider right past him, down and in.

"Huh," says the president. "Might have to choke up a little."

Although now used as a game room, the Treaty Room still has a classic feel, with a century-old painting by Theobald Chartran depicting the signing of the peace treaty after the Spanish-American War, and a magnificent mahogany "treaty table" first used by Ulysses S. Grant. A bookshelf on the north wall displays standard-issue Americana such as Poor Richard's Almanack, but it also contains former swimsuit model Kathy Ireland's Powerful Inspirations: Eight Lessons That Will Change Your Life ("There's a lot of good life stuff in there, a lot of stuff about patience," the president says) and a well-worn copy of 101 Dumb Dog Deaths ("Makes me laugh every time, especially the one about cow-tipping").

Matsuzaka delivers again, but the president looks fastball when the pitch is a change. "Damn it!" he shouts, bouncing the Wii wand off an antique globe in the corner. "Goddamn motherfucking shit!" After collecting himself, he takes a seat at his desk and leans back in his grand leather easy chair, stirring the ice cubes in a glass of Diet Coke with a finger.

So are we meeting up here because Michelle Obama is measuring the Oval Office windows for drapes?
[Laughs] No. I just like it up here. Plus, people tend to get nervous in the Oval Office. Figured I'd make it a little easier on you by doing this here.

While I was waiting, one of your staffers told me a crazy story about a certain member of your Cabinet breaking wind in the Oval Office. Can you confirm that story?
Well, like I said, people get nervous down there. It's — [laughs] — I can't believe someone told you about that.

But you're leaving office in a couple of weeks. Come on. Throw us a bone. Just think, you finally get to talk about all of these things.
Look, I can't. Besides, it wasn't that big of a — OK, fine. It was Condi.

Condoleezza Rice farted in the Oval Office! When she was the national security adviser?
No, this was when she was State. Just after I appointed her. And it wasn't no little whistler, either. She's a little lady, but she let that baby rip. Nearly blew [White House chief of staff] Andy Card's ears off.

Was this in the middle of something important?
It was January 2005. We were meeting about the first State of the Union speech of my second term. I'm telling everyone about how I wanted to make a major statement about ending tyranny around the world and spreading liberty and freedom, and the so-called pragmatists in the office, especially Cheney, are flinching, telling me I should confine myself to achievable goals. It's a serious moment, and things were getting pretty heated. At one point I turn to Condi and I say, "So, Condi, what do you think?" And she's like, "Mr. President, I think you should — "

And that's when it happened. Ppppllllfft! It sounded like someone had started up a chain saw in there. We have this painting of the Rio Grande by an artist named Tom Lea in the Oval Office, and I swear to you that thing swung three inches sideways. She started looking around all innocent-like, like, "Gosh, who did that?" It was hilarious.

Doesn't she know that cover-ups never work?
That's what Cheney said: "Condi, that's what got Nixon in trouble. You try to hide that shit, it looks 20 times worse." I tell you, it was almost a year before she so much as smiled about that incident.

Let's talk about August 6th, 2001. That's the day you got a memo warning about plans for possible attacks by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. What were you doing that day?
I'll be honest with you. I was at the ranch, on vacation. I was watching the Hall of Fame game on TV. First NFL preseason game of the year, hate to miss it, you know?

I'm the same way. It doesn't matter what teams are playing, I watch it.
Exactly. It's a long off-season, and you start to miss the game. So I'm watching it — I remember it was Miami and St. Louis. First time I ever saw Marc Bulger. He was just a backup to Warner then. I think he threw a touchdown in the fourth quarter. I thought to myself, "This guy looks pretty solid in the pocket. He might have a future in this league."

That's good foresight right there.
Anyway, it was right around then that they brought me my PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing], and it said something about bin Laden. I mean, we get these warnings about foreign terrorists all the time. How was I supposed to know he was going to attack in the United States?

Well, the memo was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S."
It was?

Yes, sir.
Well, nobody told me that.

But they wrote it to you.
But nobody told me that they wrote it to me.

Who's "they"?
I don't know. Whoever is in the room. Vice President Cheney. Don Rumsfeld. Rove. Sometimes there's some other guys. It kind of rotates.

Do you decide who "they" is?
No, they usually decide who they is. Or at least one of they does. Usually Cheney.

Interesting. What did they tell you they wrote to you about why America needed to invade Iraq?
Sometime in the fall of 2001, pretty soon after 9/11, Rumsfeld and Cheney handed me a piece of paper. I asked them what was in it. Rumsfeld says, "Mr. President, we've just written you a memo explaining that we need to invade Iraq." And I said, "OK. Why?" And Dick says to me, "Because of 9/11, Mr. President." [Silence]

Is that the whole story?
Yeah. Why?

I don't know. It kind of feels like there should be more there.
Well, later on, they explained that we had to attack Iraq before Saddam had a chance to give his weapons of mass destruction to other terrorists. George Tenet told me we had a solid case — a "slam-dunk," he called it.

But it wasn't.
That's not what they told me at the time.

Again with the "they."
OK, fine, fuck it — it was a stretch, all right? But we were trying all kinds of stuff back then. Just kind of winging it. It was an exciting time. You felt like you could say anything and people would just believe it. In those days I could have said the moon was made of string beans and CNN would have rushed it on the air [sighs]. Not like now.

The point is, it seems like you only talked to people who told you what you wanted to hear. If you didn't ever talk to anyone who would give you bad news, how was bad news supposed to get in?
That's unfair. If there was bad news, I certainly wanted to be part of it.

Really? What about the time you fired economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey after he predicted the war would cost $200 billion? Or had General Shinseki forced out after he predicted you would need several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq? Or demoted Richard Clarke when he insisted there was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda? You fired pretty much everybody who disagreed with you.
Well, that's stretching things. I didn't fire everyone who disagreed with me.

Can you name one person in your administration who disagreed with you in public and didn't get fired for it?
Sure, I can. Anthony Zinni, for instance.

The former Middle East Centcom commander? The guy who said the occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops, back when Rumsfeld was touting that whole "lean and mean fighting force" business?
Right. Him.

He was fired.
Really? They told me he was sick.

For five years?
[Shrugs]

Was there any dissension in the ranks after the war started? Did anyone at any time voice any disagreements?
Well, sure. Obviously you had the Powell-Rummy thing, which was just ongoing, never-ending. It got to be kind of a serious problem. Colin, you think he's this buttoned-up guy, but something about Rummy just made him nuts. Every time Don opened his mouth about anything in the Oval Office, I swear to God, Colin would be sitting there moving his lips and screwing up his eyes, pretending he was Rumsfeld talking. Like right in front of Rumsfeld. Don would suddenly stop talking in midsentence, just to catch Colin at it — but Colin would immediately stop moving his mouth. Then as soon as Rumsfeld started talking again, Colin would start back up. It drove Rummy crazy. One time Don got so pissed off that he jumps out of his seat and screams at Colin, like, "Fuck you, Colin! You're always fucking doing that!" And I swear to God, just at that moment, the top row of Rummy's dentures flies out of his mouth and lands on the carpet, right in the middle of the Oval Office. Like with a thud. None of us even knew he had dentures, and there they are, pink and covered in spit, just sitting there.

And immediately, and I mean immediately, Barney — I've never been prouder of that animal — he jumps up from the corner, runs over, picks up the dentures like he's been waiting years for this moment and runs out the door. Everything's quiet, except you can hear the dog's tags clinking as he runs down the hall. Rummy is just staring at us in a rage with that leathery face of his and no teeth. He looked like one of those ghosts in Jacob's Ladder. I can guarantee you that was the best day of Colin's life. From that point on, every time he came into the Oval Office, he brought Barney a bag of beef snacks.

Still, you turned out to be totally unprepared for the insurgency in Iraq. Did you really tell Pat Robertson before the war, "We're not going to have any casualties"?
I may have. But if I did, I certainly meant it in the sense of "We're not going to have soldiers getting killed." Not in the sense that you're implying.

[Confused] What sense am I implying?
I don't know, but I think you're trying to make something negative about it.

Was everybody on board about rendition — your policy of kidnapping terrorist suspects and flying them to places like Egypt, where they could be tortured?
You bet. The only problem there was John [Ashcroft, former attorney general]. He was always trying to get religious at the wrong times. You remember when that story came out about that Canadian fella we snatched up?

Maher Arar? The guy you kidnapped at JFK Airport and took to Syria?
Exactly. Well, the press got on us pretty good about that. I mean, it doesn't look good when you take some Canadian guy, throw a bag over his head, kidnap him and spend a year beating his ass in some basement in Syria. We call a meeting to figure out how to deal with it. We're going over the options, and when it comes John's turn to suggest what we should do, he asks us to start praying for the guy! "Let's all bring it in," he's saying. And he takes Andy's and Condi's hands and starts asking the Lord to help ease the pain suffered by the guy's family, blah blah blah. Well, you should have seen the look on Rummy's face. He about shat. You have to remember, this is John's people who fucked this up in the first place — the FBI shouldn't have flagged the guy, given how little they had on him. So technically this is John's fault that we're all eating this mess. So Rummy says, "Hey, John — how come when we fuck up, you find all kinds of answers here on the planet Earth, but when Justice fucks up, it's God's will?"

Colin Powell says you guys had a little accident while you were working out the whole waterboarding protocol.
Yeah. We were actually right here in this room when that happened. Dick is going over what we can and cannot do legally to prisoners. Rummy is asking if we can stick hot pokers in their ears. "That works," he says, "I've done it to my kids." Dick's like, "No, I don't think so, I think they'll get us for that. But we've got this thing the Army uses in training, they call it waterboarding, which will hold up in court." Dick explains that it was invented by the Spanish Inquisition, but it was also used a lot by the Khmer Rouge. Rummy's eyes light up: "Oh, the Khmer Rouge." He likes the Khmer Rouge, is always talking about their management model. I've never heard of it, so I say, "I want to see it. Can we see it?"

Dick shrugs. Just at that moment, one of our houseboys comes in bringing coffees and some Mylanta for Rummy on a silver tray. He's a Laotian kid named Manny, nice boy, has a lazy eye, a stutter and a big mole on his neck. Apparently some guys at State took him in after one of his family's oxen stepped on an old land mine and blew up his mom and two of his sisters in the bush somewhere. I make sure to give him five dollars every Christmas because of that. So Rummy says, "Hey, Manny, can you do me a favor? Can you lie on this table?" And Manny is like, "Y-y-y-yes, Secretary R-r-r-rumsfeld."

So we put him on the table and Dick holds a napkin over his eyes and then starts pouring big gulps of ice water out of a pitcher into his nose and mouth. "C-c-c-can't b-b-b-reathe!" Manny gasps, and Dick is like, "We know, Manny, that's why we're doing this. Just relax." Next, Don starts pouring hot coffee in his ears and eyes, and Manny screams, at which point Dick says, "No, Don, it's not about temperature or burning, it's all about drowning." Rummy nods, and we go back to pouring the water up his nose. Manny is kicking and screaming, and Dick finally starts getting mad. "You're making a lot of noise, Manny. You're going to have to calm down."

But Manny is still screaming and Rummy is shaking his head, like he's not sure it's really working. "I still say it would work better if you could apply some heat," he says. "Here, try this." So he takes out his lighter and uses it to set Manny's ears on fire. "There, look at that," he says. Manny is really flailing around now, and Don looks totally engaged in the process.

"Mmm," Dick says. "I just don't think the law is going to let us do that." So they launch into an argument about it, and after a while we realize that Manny isn't moving anymore. There's a little streak of vomit coming out of his mouth and his little eyes have stopped blinking. Basically, he died. We had to get a new houseboy. One good thing about that is we made the decision not to set people's ears on fire.

Do you ever look back on the past eight years and think, "Maybe I shouldn't have let Dick Cheney run everything"?
All the time. I mean, I was here when my dad was president. Those old guys like Dick managed to do all the work back then without fucking absolutely everything up. I figured Dick would do the paperwork, and I would kiss the occasional baby and throw out the first ball at Camden Yards once a year. Instead, I'm, like, up to my eyes in bodies here. Dick was this quiet accountant type in my dad's administration, but for me he's been a cross between Ted Bundy and Rommel. Thanks to him, I can't even take a walk on the Liberty University quad without people throwing shit at me.

But he handled things smoothly for your dad?
Hell, my dad barely went through two sticks of deodorant his entire presidency. He and Mommy spent all of 1989 in a cribbage game. I remember walking in the Residence once and being like, "Communism just collapsed." And they're like, "Just a minute, son."

You often talked about how you didn't need to seek your father's advice as president, that you appealed to a "higher father." Why not call your dad every now and then?
Let me tell you something about my dad. When I was seven, my three-year-old sister, Robin, died of leukemia. You know how he told me? It was five days later. Robin's seat at the dinner table was empty. I'm like, "Daddy, where's Robin?" And he's like, "She's dead. Finish your peas."

Let's go back to the 2004 election. How confident did you feel about your re-election once you saw that John Kerry was the Democratic nominee?
We all felt pretty good. Karl especially.

Why?
I remember one scene in particular. It was the night Kerry won all those states on Super Tuesday and locked up the nomination. He's giving his acceptance speech right down the street in the Old Post Office building here in D.C., giving me all kinds of shit as usual, calling me arrogant, reckless, inept, all that shit. And as he's saying this stuff about me, the crowd is cheering like it's a World Series win, which is never something a politician likes to see. And I say to Karl, "Hey, Karl, what the hell? Are we vulnerable here?" And Karl says to me, calm as day, "Mr. President, this guy Kerry, every time he opens his mouth, it looks like it just had a cock in it. Don't worry, it's gonna be a walk."

You called Kerry that night, if I remember correctly.
Yeah. Karl was also on the line on another phone in the room, he had his hand over the mouthpiece. It was hilarious. My girl tells Kerry to hold for the president of the United States, and he's, like, trembling on the phone, you could almost hear it. So I come on and I'm like, "I'll have a large pie with ham and pineapple. And don't skimp on the pineapple."

Kerry, the tool, he doesn't know what to say, so he's like, "Uh, um, Mr. President, I look forward to a clean, honest campaign. I, uh, hope we have a spirited debate, blah blah blah." I look over at Karl, and Karl's nodding at me, like, Go for it. So I'm like, "And get me two Dr Peppers and a bag of those fucking garlic twists." And Kerry's like, "Mr. President. . . ." And I cut him off, and I'm like, "No, make it two bags. And don't forget the salt!" Karl's giggling like crazy. Then we hang up and tell the press that we just congratulated Senator Kerry on an "important victory." It was like that all year. We were two steps ahead of that clown the whole way.

Was the Swift-boat thing your idea?
No, that was Karl too. You have to remember, the thing about Karl — what he always told me is that you don't hit a guy where he's weak, you hit him where he thinks he's strong. He said the thing about Kerry is that everywhere he goes, he's, like, pulling his medals out and showing them off, like a guy trying to get laid in a bar at three in the morning. So we figured we'd put it out there like he didn't really earn them or whatever. And, hey, maybe that was a low blow, but the reason it worked is that he was so freaking touchy about it. Every time he squawked about it, I'd just pick up the phone and order up a whole new round of 527 ads giving Kerry shit about his medals. I was like, "Waitress, double that order!" That guy . . . he just wasn't serious.

Let's talk about some of the low points of your second term. Why did you make such a big deal out of intervening in the whole Terri Schiavo thing?
Well, Jeb calls me up one day and says, "A bunch of Jew lawyers are trying to pull the plug on some broad down here. I think we can spin it that they're doing it because she's Christian." I ask him what he means, and he tells me the story. I tell Karl, and Karl says to me, "Mr. President, I am fully erect. This is a winner all the way." He says we can jam up Bill Nelson down there for his Senate race by forcing him to take sides with the husband in the story, who's like this Mike Ditka-looking atheist guy who wants to starve his wife to death while he's running around knocking up other chicks. Politics is all about forcing people to make simple choices, that's what my dad always told me, and this one was an A+ choice for us. Karl, you should have seen him, he was on the phone day and night, telling every news director in the country that he wanted to see that Schiavo lady's face "on every channel, like it's the State of the Union address." So sure enough, we're watching TV later that night, and CNN just has her and her drooling-ass, doped-up smile on this endless loop. Karl is literally jumping up and down with excitement at the sight of her. "She's the best thing since Old Yeller," he's saying. "I want to see every liberal in the country on Larry King campaigning to yank her feeding tube. Get Ben Affleck on there, Sean Penn. Show them side by side with her looking fat and helpless with those dead-fish eyes of hers, split-screen. She'll get us 10,000 votes an hour."

Too bad she died.

Yeah. Karl was almost inconsolable when she passed. He kept looking for a replacement. Karen Hughes called it his "vegetable hunt." He'd call long lists of registered Democrats, asking if they had a brain-dead wife they wanted to pull the plug on.

About five months later, Hurricane Katrina hit. With all due respect, Mr. President, what went wrong?
Yeah, that was a bad scene. As you know, the storm coincided with a vacation I had planned. The first leg of it wasn't really a vacation — I had to go to Arizona to stroke John McCain on his birthday. Then I had to do some hug-the-old-lady deals in Arizona and California for some Medicare thing we were pushing. After that, I turn in for the night. Nobody says anything to me.

Next day, I'm working a crowd at the Coronado Naval Base with a famous country-and-western singer — I won't say who. As we're coming off stage he says to me, "So, Mr. President, what are you going to do about all those niggers in the Superdome?" And I'm like, "You mean the Saints?" And he says, "No, Mr. President. New Orleans got hit by this huge hurricane, and now there's, like, 3 million of them people camped out in the Superdome, braining each other with aluminum bats." I just figured it was some crazy-ass hillbilly nightmare he was spewing.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I was back at Crawford chain-sawing some brush trees, that Karl comes running out in his suit at full speed. He's moving so fast, his tits are nearly knocking his eyes out. He's like, "You've got to go on TV in 10 minutes. There's been a terrible disaster in New Orleans. The whole city is underwater." So that's the first indication I had from my own people that anything really serious had happened.

Tell me how Michael Brown ended up in charge of that situation.
I knew we had a problem about three weeks before Katrina, when I visited him at his home in Oklahoma. Brownie has stables, because he used to run some kind of association for Arabian horses before he worked for us. Anyway, he's showing me some of his animals, and he comes to this big stallion that he's named after himself. I mean, the stallion's name is "Mike Brown." He's talking to it in little baby talk, too, like, "Oh, what a good boy you are, Mike Brown! You're such a good boy!" Then he leans over, grabs the horse by the schlong — the horse is hung literally to the barn floor — and says to me, "Just look at the cock on this one, Mr. President. You can touch it if you want."

And I'm like, "Uh, no, that's OK, Brownie, I can see it from here." And he's like, "Yeah, I know you can see it from there. You could probably see it from Tulsa."

So I tell Andy and Karl to get rid of the guy. I mean, guy names a horse after himself and fondles its balls — who needs that? Rummy promises to stick him in Gitmo, let him read the Koran and shit through a hole in the floor for a few dozen years.

But then how did you end up saying . . .
I'm getting to that. When I fly to Mobile after Katrina to give a speech, I walk into this big airplane hangar where the whole emergency management team is waiting. There are cameras everywhere, and who's standing right in front but — Mike Brown! I'm thinking, "What is this guy doing still alive? I thought we fixed this problem!" It turns out that we forgot to disappear him. Karl thought Andy was doing it, Andy thought Karl was doing it. I panicked. That's when the whole "Heckuva job, Brownie" thing came out.

We're now in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Do you feel any responsibility for what's happening?
Hey, markets is markets. Whatever happens in a market is what's supposed to happen. You're not supposed to interfere. That's why they call the market the hidden hand. If I can see your hands, it's communism.

Are you saying that what's happening is good?
I'm saying if you hand a retard a pistol and he shoots himself, that's the market. And markets are good.

So when it comes to the economy, your policy was to hand out pistols to retards.
All I'm saying is that if you did hand him a pistol, he might shoot himself and he might not. But if he does, that's capitalism, and that's the system we live by. It's America.

You forget, I was elected to this office twice by the people of this country. They trusted my sense of right and wrong. That's what they elected me for, to protect these basic values of right and wrong, freedom and unfreedom. And if that isn't always enough — well, you might not like it, but that's the way things work in this democracy we have. I was elected and I did the best job that I could.

Mr. President, it almost sounds to me like you're saying that it's not your fault that we elected you.
It isn't.

But it is your fault you ran, isn't it?
Why shouldn't I run? I have every right to run.

Sure you do. It's a free country. But if you weren't qualified for this office, you also had a responsibility not to run.
[Somberly] Yeah. Well. I did wonder about that once or twice.

When? What happened to make you think of that?
It wasn't anything specific. It's just sometimes, the way people looked at me. Laura.

Laura said something to you?
Not exactly. We were in bed one night, watching TV, and we saw this thing on the news about some poll in the Middle East showing that I was the most hated man in the Arab world, getting three times as many votes as the second-place guy, who was Ariel Sharon. And I said to her, "Jeez, what the fuck did I do to deserve that?"

And she said?
She didn't say anything. She just kind of gave me this look. Like she was sad. My dad does it too, sometimes. Like there's something they want to say to me, but won't.

I think there are a lot of people who feel that way.
Really? What do they want to say?

Do you really want to know?
Sure.

OK, here it is. You're the child of two emotionally absent aristocrats who denied you any kind of love and affection from an early age. You grew up resentful and lacking completely in natural gifts or curiosity and by early adulthood found yourself desperate to fulfill the expectations your parents by then mostly had only for your much more competent brother, Jeb. You failed every test you ever faced as a young man and were unable to hold any job at all until the age of 45 or so, at which time you decided to try to win some self-respect by going into the family business. You were aided in this quest by a bunch of narrow-minded lackeys and holdovers from your father's administration who every step of the way manipulated your obvious Oedipal resentments to their advantage, enriching themselves and their friends. All you wanted was a pat on the back and a few accomplishments of your own to hang your hat on, but instead you're about to spend the rest of eternity pondering your now-official legacy as the worst and most pigheaded leader in the history of Western democracy, a man who almost single-handedly sank the mightiest nation on Earth by turning the presidency into a $50 trillion therapy session that ended in two disastrous wars, a financial crisis that threatens the entire system of international capitalism, and a legacy of corruption on a scale not seen since the Borgias or maybe Nero.

That, Mr. President, is what they're thinking and not saying to you.

Jeez. I thought you guys were a music magazine.

We are. You have any album recommendations?
Sure, I thought you might ask that. I like —

Just kidding. Time's up. Sorry.
No, really, I do have one more thing to say.

What's that?
I'm sorry?

You're sorry? For what?
[Sighs] I, uh . . . you know, I remember back in 1989, I was thinking about buying a couple of Sizzler franchises in Lubbock.

You should have done it.
And I told my dad what I was thinking, and you know what he said?

No. What?
He said, "Good idea, son. It's hard to fuck up steak."

We get it. Your father was a dick. So what? Buy a puppy or something. That's what everyone else does.
Yeah. [A single tear rolls down his cheek.] I guess I fucked up, huh?

Big-time. Can we have the world back now?
Sure, I guess. I really am sorry.

Gotta run. Later.
[Whimpering] I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

~lee.

this is one of the single greatest things i've ever read...

2009-03-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

[from rolling stone...]

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

~lee.

"the overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? the overarching question is: why has there been so little?"

2009-03-21T10:07:00.000-07:00

[from salon...]

The virtues of public anger and the need for more

With lightning speed and lockstep unanimity, opinion-making elites jointly embraced and are now delivering the same message about the public rage triggered this week by the AIG bonus scandal: This scandal is insignificant. It's just a distraction. And, most important of all, public anger is unhelpful and must be contained or, failing that, ignored.

This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.

It makes perfect sense that those who are satisfied with the prevailing order -- because it rewards them in numerous ways -- are desperate to pacify public fury. Thus we find unanimous decrees that public calm (i.e., quiet) be restored. It's a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites -- the Experts -- to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.

While that framework is arguably reasonable where the establishment class is competent, honest, and restrained, what we have had -- and have -- is exactly the opposite: a political class and financial elite that is rotted to the core and running amok. We've had far too little public rage given the magnitude of this rot, not an excess of rage. What has been missing more than anything else is this: fear on the part of the political and financial class of the public which they have been systematically defrauding and destroying.

* * * * *

These endless lectures from sober, rational pundits about the relative quantitative insignificance of the AIG bonuses are condescending straw men. Nobody thinks that $165 million in bonuses for the people who destroyed AIG is what has caused the financial crisis. Nobody thinks that recouping those bonuses or having prevented them in the first place would solve or even mitigate systemic collapse. The amounts are miniscule in the context of the broader economic issues. Everyone is aware of that; nobody needs to have that pointed out. As Armando astutely observed, the attempt now to dismiss the anger over the AIG bonuses as the by-product of simple-minded ignorance and/or ideological rigidity (class warfare! crass populism!) is quite similar to how anti-war arguments were stigmatized before the attack on Iraq : ignore the screeching pacifists and let the sober Experts make the decisions, for they know best.

The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them.

Eliot Spitzer is absolutely right that, even at AIG, there are far larger scandals than the bonuses, such as the undiscounted compensation of AIG's counter-parties such as Goldman Sachs (and just by the way: it is indescribably symbolic that Spitzer has been punished and disgraced for his acts of consensual adult sex while the targets of his prescient Wall St. investigations, who basically destroyed the world economy, remain protected and empowered). But the bonus scandal is illustrative of why the crisis happened, who caused it to happen, and the ongoing political dominance of the perpetrators. It is, as Robert Reich put it, "a nightmarish metaphor for the Obama Administration's problems administering the bailout of Wall Street."

The financial crisis has merely unmasked the corruption and rot in our establishment institutions that are staggering in magnitude and reach. Just as the Iraq War was not the by-product of wrongdoing by a few stray bad political and media actors but instead was reflective of our broken institutions generally, the financial crisis is a fundamental indictment on the way the country functions and of its ruling class. What would be unhealthy is if there weren't substantial amounts of public rage in the face of these revelations.

* * * * *

Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone article perfectly summarizes what the AIG scandal reveals about our political and economic system, and should be read in full. In sum: financial elites own the Government and both political parties. Their money drowns Washington and their lobbyists control it. They used that ownership of Government to abolish decades-old legal and regulatory protections which previously constrained what they could do. In the lawless environment which they literally purchased from our political leaders, they were able to pillage and pilfer and steal without limit. And even now that everything has come crashing down, they continue to dictate what the Government's response is, to ensure that they -- the prime authors of the disaster -- are the prime beneficiaries, at the public's expense, of the "solutions," solutions which preserve their ill-gotten gains and heighten even further their power and influence. Taibbi:

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. . .

Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

The story of Goldman Sachs -- its tentacles entrenched in every aspect of the Government and the blindingly favorable treatment it therefore continues to receive -- demonstrates, just standing alone, how pervasive the oligarchical decay is.

Atrios has been writing a version of the same key observation virtually every day for weeks -- that almost every plan to "solve" the financial crisis involves nothing more than transfers of enormous amounts of public money into the pockets of the same unchanged system and the same people who caused the collapse in the first place:

The issue is that [Geithner] and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn't do it.

In condemning Geithner's "bank rescue" plan, Paul Krugman notes that -- yet again -- it enables great benefits for the richest investors, with the public protecting them from the risk of losses (privatize gains; socialize losses), and concludes: "The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system." When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo. Read John Cole's summary of expert reaction to Geithner's banking plan.

That is why the AIG scandal, rightfully so, is producing so much public outrage -- because it demonstrates what the political and economic system really is, a system which the Government continues to prop up and embrace. Brian Beutler put it this way:

It's not that the success of the bailout depends on what happens to these $160 million, but that these $160 million strongly suggest that some very rich, and, perhaps, very bad men have leveraged their way into control of the whole bailout process and the government's now following their lead. And their incentives are, to say the least, not in line with the best interests of the vast majority of taxpayers. . . .

It's simply not the case that Geithner and other high-level economic officials were so concerned with the bigger picture that they outsourced the question of compensation to Congress entirely. On the contrary, they were extremely involved in resolving that very question. They were opposed to strict compensation limits. . . .

But clearly they also thought that letting executives take home big fat piles of government money was either a matter of expedience or a matter of necessity. And either way it has huge implications for the success or failure of one of the most expensive and urgent government programs in the country's history.

The AIG scandal vividly reveals how corrupt and self-interested are the people who are still exerting primary control over this process, which is why our establishment class is so eager to demand that everyone look away. For months, Americans have been told that they must sacrifice and trust the Government to engage in extraordinary actions if they want to stave off another Great Depression, only to watch as hundreds of billions of dollars fly to the very people who are the prime culprits. As Jane Hamsher put it: "The 'populist rage' that the pundits find so unseemly is actually the appropriate response."

* * * * *

We saw this week the benefits which unbridled and intimidating public rage can produce. The retroactive, confiscatory tax on bonuses imposed by the House is, to be sure, a crude and troubling (and arguably unconstitutional) response. But the virtues of that episode easily exceed its vices: Congress sought to seize those bonuses because, for once, they were afraid of simmering public fury and responded to it rather than to the dictates of the corporate and lobbyist class that owns them and which they serve. Whatever marginal "unfairness" that tax might produce pales by many, many magnitudes when set aside the decade-long (and ongoing) pillaging of America's financial security and the future of its middle class by the financial owners of our political system.

And that's the point: only this true, intense, and -- yes -- scary public rage can serve as a check on ongoing pilfering by the narrowed monied factions who control our Government for their own interests and who otherwise have no reason to stop. Who else is going to impose those checks? The bought-and-paid-for, incomparably subservient, impotent and inept Congress? The establishment-loyal, vapid political press? An executive branch run by the very people who are most vested in, dependent on, and loyal to the financial system that produced these disasters? Only a healthy fear of the populace -- exactly what has been missing -- can achieve that.

Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny (as Armando notes, its isolated, unrepresentative excesses (death threats!) are already being exaggerated to discredit the underlying anger itself). But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function. Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.

The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little? A political establishment that can function without any fear of the citizenry will inevitably trample on its interests. That is what has been happening more than anything else. And it is why we need far more public outrage, and fear of that outrage more deeply implanted in the minds of our political and financial elites.

-- Glenn Greenwald

~lee.

"cheney and his like are the evil people... we are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people such as he."

2009-03-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Lawrence Wilkerson: Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay

Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative.

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one.

For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated.

This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man, initially at least.

The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

Another unknown, a part of the fabric of the foregoing four, was the sheer incompetence involved in cataloging and maintaining the pertinent factors surrounding the detainees that might be relevant in any eventual legal proceedings, whether in an established court system or even in a kangaroo court that pretended to at least a few of the essentials, such as evidence.

Simply stated, even for those two dozen or so of the detainees who might well be hardcore terrorists, there was virtually no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of evidence, and no attention to the details that almost any court system would demand. Falling back on "sources and methods" and "intelligence secrets" became the Bush administration's modus operandi to camouflage this grievous failing.

But their ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war, by their own pronouncements, had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, its not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.

In addition, it has never come to my attention in any persuasive way--from classified information or otherwise--that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement.

This is perhaps the most astounding truth of all, carefully masked by men such as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney in their loud rhetoric--continuing even now in the case of Cheney--about future attacks thwarted, resurgent terrorists, the indisputable need for torture and harsh interrogation and for secret prisons and places such as GITMO.

Lastly, there is the now prevalent supposition, recently reinforced by the new team in the White House, that closing down our prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay would take some time and development of a highly complex plan. Because of the unfortunate political realities now involved--Cheney's recent strident and almost unparalleled remarks about the dangers of pampering terrorists, and the vulnerability of the Democrats in general on any national security issue--this may have some truth to it.

But in terms of the physical and safe shutdown of the prison facilities it is nonsense. As early as 2004 and certainly in 2005, administration leaders such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and John Bellinger, Legal Advisor to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and, later, to that same individual as Secretary of State, and others were calling for the facilities to be shut down. No one will ever convince me that as astute a man as Gordon England would have made such a call if he did not have a plan for answering it. And if there is not such a plan, is not its absence simply another reason to condemn this most incompetent of administrations? After all, President Bush himself said he would like to close GITMO.

Recently, in an attempt to mask some of these failings and to exacerbate and make even more difficult the challenge to the new Obama administration, former Vice President Cheney gave an interview from his home in McLean, Virginia. The interview was almost mystifying in its twisted logic and terrifying in its fear-mongering.

As to twisted logic: "Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo (sic) during the Bush administration...have gone back into the business of being terrorists." So, the fact that the Bush administration was so incompetent that it released 61 terrorists, is a valid criticism of the Obama administration? Or was this supposed to be an indication of what percentage of the still-detained men would likely turn to terrorism if released in future? Or was this a revelation that men kept in detention such as those at GITMO--even innocent men--would become terrorists if released because of the harsh treatment meted out to them at GITMO? Seven years in jail as an innocent man might do that for me. Hard to tell.

As for the fear-mongering: "When we get people who are more interested in reading the rights to an Al Qaeda (sic) terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry," Cheney said. Who in the Obama administration has insisted on reading any al-Qa'ida terrorist his rights? More to the point, who in that administration is not interested in protecting the United States--a clear implication of Cheney's remarks.

But far worse is the unmistakable stoking of the 20 million listeners of Rush Limbaugh, half of whom we could label, judiciously, as half-baked nuts. Such remarks as those of the former vice president's are like waving a red flag in front of an incensed bull. And Cheney of course knows that.

Cheney went on to say in his McLean interview that "Protecting the country's security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." I have to agree but the other way around. Cheney and his like are the evil people and we certainly are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people such as he.

When--and if--the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.

On that revelation and those actions rests much of the credibility of our nation's return to sobriety and our truest values. In fact, on such positive developments may ultimately rest our entire future as a free people. For there shall inevitably be future terrorist attacks. Al-Qa'ida has been hurt, badly, largely by our military actions in Afghanistan and our careful and devastating moves to stymie its financial support networks.

But al-Qa'ida will be back. Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa'ida's resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed.

~lee.

jon stewart deserves a pulitzer prize, i think...

2009-03-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

[from the daily show...]

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Intro - Brawl Street: Get Ready to Buy Low! And Sell Die

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

[from salon...]

There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer

The mindless complicity in disseminating false claims is not aberrational media behavior; it is, as they acknowledge, the crux of what they do.

Glenn Greenwald

Mar. 13, 2009 |

Jon Stewart is being widely celebrated today and Jim Cramer/CNBC widely mocked -- both rightfully so -- for Stewart's devastatingly adversarial interview of Cramer (who, just by the way, is a Marty Peretz creation). If you haven't yet seen the interview, you can and should watch it here; if you watch only one segment, watch the middle one and the beginning of the third.

Stewart focuses on the role Cramer and CNBC played in mindlessly disseminating and uncritically amplifying the false claims from the CEOs and banks which spawned the financial crisis with their blatantly untoward and often illegal practices. Here is the crux of Stewart's critique of Cramer/CNBC:

STEWART: This thing was 10 years in the making . . . . The idea that you could have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that had leveraged 35-1 and then blame mortgage holders, that's insane. . . .

CRAMER: I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show. I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show. It's very painful. I don't have subpoena power. . . .

STEWART: You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months. The entire network was.

CRAMER: But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, called me in - he called me in when the stock was at 40 -- because I was saying: "look, I thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the wrong place" - he brings me in and lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.

STEWART [feigning shock]: The CEO of a company lied to you?

CRAMER: Shocking.

STEWART: But isn't that financial reporting? What do you think is the role of CNBC? . . . .

CRAMER: I didn't think that Bear Stearns would evaporate overnight. I knew the people who ran it. I thought they were honest. That was my mistake. I really did. I thought they were honest. Did I get taken in because I knew them before? Maybe, to some degree. . . .

It's difficult to have a reporter say: "I just came from an interview with Hank Paulson and he lied his darn-fool head off." It's difficult. I think it challenges the boundaries.

STEWART: But what is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? . . . . I'm under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out (applause).

That's the heart of the (completely justifiable) attack on Cramer and CNBC by Stewart. They would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical "interviews" and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods. And now that they're being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is: Well, we were lied to. What could we have done? And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be "reporters" are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims and then to inform the public if the claims are true. That's about as basic as it gets.

Today, everyone -- including media stars everywhere -- is going to take Stewart's side and all join in the easy mockery of Cramer and CNBC, as though what Stewart is saying is so self-evidently true and what Cramer/CNBC did is so self-evidently wrong. But there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps. The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does -- and, when compelled to do so, they say so and are proud of it.

At least give credit to Cramer for facing his critics and addressing (and even acknowledging the validity of) the criticisms. By stark contrast, most of our major media stars simply ignore all criticisms of their corrupt behavior and literally suppress it (even if the criticisms appear as major, lengthy front-page exposés in The New York Times).

Perhaps the most egregious instance of this media cowardice is that there are very few occasions when media stars were willing to address criticisms of their behavior in the run-up to the war. With very few exceptions, they have systematically ignored the criticisms that have been voiced from many sources about the CNBC-like role they played in the dissemination of pre-Iraq-War and other key Bush falsehoods. But on those very few occasions when they were forced to address these issues, their responses demonstrate that they said and did exactly what we're all going to spend today mocking and deriding Cramer and CNBC for having done -- and they continue, to this day, to do that.

One of the very few television programs ever to address the media's complicit dissemination of Bush's pre-war falsehoods was Bill Moyers' superb 2007 PBS documentary, Buying the War. While most of the media propagandists whom Moyers wanted to interview cowardly refused to answer questions, Tim Russert, to his credit, did appear. Here are the excuses which Russert offered for the general role the media played in spreading Bush administration lies and the specific role Russert played in uncritically amplifying Dick Cheney's assertions about Saddam's nuclear program. I challenge anyone to identify any differences between what Cramer/CNBC did and the justifying excuses Russert offered:

BILL MOYERS: Quoting anonymous administration officials, the Times reported that Saddam Hussein had launched a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb using specially designed aluminum tubes.

And there on Meet the Press that same morning was Vice President Cheney:

DICK CHENEY (MEET THE PRESS NBC 9/8/02): … Tubes. There's a story in the NEW YORK TIMES this morning, this is-- and I want to attribute this to the TIMES. I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but--

JONATHAN LANDAY, MC CLATCHYS: Now, ordinarily information like the aluminum tubes wouldn't appear. It was top secret intelligence, and the Vice President and the National Security Advisor would not be allowed to talk about this on the Sunday talk shows. But, it appeared that morning in the NEW YORK TIMES and, therefore, they were able to talk about it.

DICK CHENEY (MEET THE PRESS NBC 9/8/02): It's now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire and we have been able to intercept to prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.

BILL MOYERS: Did you see that performance?

BOB SIMON, CBS: I did.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

BOB SIMON: I thought it was remarkable.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

BOB SIMON: Remarkable. You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that's a remarkable thing to do. . . .

TIM RUSSERT (MEET THE PRESS), TO CHENEY: What specifically has [Saddam] obtained that you believe will enhance his nuclear development program?

BILL MOYERS: Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know. The NEW YORK TIMES is a better judge of that than I am.

BILL MOYERS: No one tipped you that it was going to happen?

TIM RUSSERT: No, no. I mean-

BILL MOYERS: The Cheney office didn't leak to you that there's gonna be a big story?

TIM RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don't have the-- This is, you know-- on MEET THE PRESS, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum tubes story until I read it in the NEW YORK TIMES.

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September Eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the Administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES. And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

BILL MOYERS: Bob Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring.

BILL MOYERS: You said a moment ago when we started talking to people who knew about aluminum tubes. What people-who were you talking to?

BOB SIMON: We were talking to people - to scientists - to scientists and to researchers, and to people who had been investigating Iraq from the start.

BILL MOYERS: Would these people have been available to any reporter who called or were they exclusive sources for 60 MINUTES?

BOB SIMON: No, I think that many of them would have been available to any reporter who called.

BILL MOYERS: And you just picked up the phone?

BOB SIMON: Just picked up the phone.

BILL MOYERS: Talked to them?

BOB SIMON: Talked to them and then went down with the cameras. . . .

WALTER PINCUS: More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of Administration statements, and critics of the Administration. And we've sort of given up being independent on our own.

Compare Russert's self-defense to how and why he uncritically amplified Government lies ("I wish my phone had rung") to Cramer's pretense of victimization over the fact that CEOs lied to him and so there was nothing he could do but assume they were telling the truth ("I don't have subpoena power"). Stewart's primary criticism of Cramer applies with exactly equal force to the excuse offered by Tim "Wish My Phone Had Rung" Russert, who -- to this day -- is held up as the supposed Beacon of Tough Adversarial Journalism in America:

I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out.

The point that can't be emphasized enough is that this isn't a matter of past history. Unlike Cramer -- who at least admitted fault last night and said he was "chastized" -- most establishment journalists won't acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the behavior of the press corps during the Bush years. The most they'll acknowledge is that it was confined to a couple of bad apples -- The Judy Miller Defense. But the Cramer-like journalistic behavior during that period that was so widespread and did so much damage is behavior that our press corps, to this day, believes is proper and justified.

The only other occasion when media stars were forced to address these criticisms was when Bush's own Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, wrote a book accusing the American media of being "too deferential" to the administration. In response, Russert's replacement, David Gregory, twice insisted that the criticisms directed at the press for the role they played in the run-up to the war are baseless and misguided -- most recently in an interview with Stephen Colbert (after defending the media's pre-war behavior, Gregory was promoted by NBC to his Meet the Press position). When defending the media's behavior, Gregory echoed exactly the defining mentality of Jim Cramer: pointing out when officials are lying is "not our role," said Gregory.

During that same time period, two of the three network news anchors (with Katie Couric dissenting) defended the media's pre-war behavior as well. In fact, this is what ABC's Charlie Gibson said -- echoing the Cramer view of journalism -- after Couric argued that the media failed to do its job in scrutinizing pre-war Bush claims:

It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. And it is not our job to debate them; it's our job to ask the questions.

Identically, The Washington Post's David Ignatius actually praised the media's failure to object to pre-war Bush lies as a reflection of what Ignatius said is the media's supreme "professionalism":

In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it.

It's fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Cramer and CNBC. That's absolutely warranted. But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn't an aberration. What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles. But at least Cramer wants to appear to be contrite for the complicit role he played in disseminating incredibly destructive and false claims from the politically powerful. That stands in stark contrast to David Gregory, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, David Ignatius and most of their friends, who continue to be defiantly and pompously proud of the exact same role they play.

~lee.

"The story of Ayn Rand is strangely revealing about the world - and the America that is slipping away..."

2009-03-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

[from the huffington post...]

The Last Person On Earth To Turn To Now Is Ayn Rand

In a depression triggered by raw greed and unhinged deregulation, who should you turn to for advice? I would say the last person - the very last on earth - would be Ayn Rand, the Philosopher-Queen of America's billionaire CEOs, a woman who wrote a book called 'the Virtue of Selfishness' and meant every word. Yet she is one of the strange beneficiaries of this crash.

Her philosophy was summarised perfectly on 30th December 2004, when it was becoming clear that the Boxing Day tsunami had washed away whole generations in South East Asia. The Ayn Rand Institute sent out a stark press release. It was headed: "US Should Not Help Tsunami Victims." Do not give cash. Do not send help. Leave them.

This was not a random piece of spite. It expressed - with admirable clarity - a philosophy that has influenced some of the most powerful people in the world. Ayn Rand is the only novelist whose work has been read by every single US Congressman. Nor is her appeal confined to an elite: when the Library of Congress recently conducted a massive poll to find the most influential book in the US, her 1070-page parable of market fundamentalism, Atlas Shrugged, came second. The only author to beat her was God. Rand's centenary was greeted with a slew of official celebrations, including a US postage stamp bearing her fierce smile.

The story of Ayn Rand is strangely revealing about the world - and the America that is slipping away. She was born into a family of wealthy Russian merchants during the moody dawn of the twentieth century, and she spent her teenage years watching their riches and their dignity being stripped away by the Bolshevik Revolution and the psychopathic police state it created. She escaped as a young woman to America, and began to outline a philosophy called 'Objectivism' that was the exact opposite of everything she had fled. Where the Bolsheviks collectivised everything and left the individual with nothing, Ayn demanded a mirror-image world where everything was privatised and nothing - no scrap of humanity - was left for the public sphere. The pure, unfettered individual was all. There should be "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest" - so taxation should be abolished, and all human worth should be measured by "exchange value". Altruism - like giving to an orphaned tsunami victim - is an "evil" betrayal of your own ego, an unforgivable act of pity. The only beneficiary of you actions should be you.

She explained her philosophy at first through pot-boilers like The Fountainhead. One of her heroes boasts that he is the polar opposite of Robin Hood: "He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich, or to be more exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich." If you want a sign of Rand's quiet victory, close your eyes and realise this could be Dick Cheney in one of his more candid moments, explaining the logic behind his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Rand's morality was a perfect fit for the age of the celebrity billionaire. She conjures a world where the CEO is Messiah, where the sign of the Cross is replaced with the sign of the dollar, and where hideous penis-proxies like Trump Towers are the pinnacle of human achievement. In her novel Atlas Shrugged, the world's billionaires - the Ted Turners and Donald Trumps - go on strike in protest against the "insane regulations" and "exorbitant tax" handed down from Washington D.C. The country quickly regresses into anarchy, with businesses collapsing, food distribution networks falling apart, and America becoming a wasteland - until finally the grateful populace welcomes back their economic Overlords and promises to never again pester them with wild notions like taxation or regulation.

Rand's extremism is often indistinguishable from parody. In an episode of The Simpsons, baby Maggie is despatched to the Ayn Rand School For Tots, motto: Crying is Futile. The headmistress explains that babies are not allowed bottles because "When a baby reaches for a bottle, she is saying 'I am a leech!' Our aim here is to develop the bottle within." But is this more comic than the actual decision of the Ayn Rand Institute to picket Bill Clinton's summit discussing how to increase volunteerism in the United States, on the grounds that unpaid voluntary work is an "unforgivable act of altruism"? Is it more ludicrous than that fact that when Rand died in 1982, her body was laid out beside a six-foot tall floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign?

It is just about possible to understand how Rand herself could have formulated this preposterous vision as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder after the nightmare of Leninism. But how can we explain her extraordinary popularity in the United States among people who have never experienced communism? Many of Rand's personal disciples now fill the most powerful slots in US public life, from the benches of the Supreme Court to (until this year) the head of the Federal Reserve. For example, Alan Greenspan - who was considered by many people to be the most powerful man in America for the decade he headed the US central bank - was a fervent Randroid. He wrote that Atlas Shrugged is a great novel because it shows how "parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish, as they should." Her appeal spread higher still: Ronald Reagan loved her novels, and if George Bush could read, he would too. Nor is her appeal narrow: her books still sell half a million copies a year, and even the freshmen class of the putatively liberal Berkeley campus recently voted her the author who had most influenced them.

Of course, her practical influence should not be exaggerated. Even most right-wing Americans consider the specifics of Rand's philosophy to be loopy. Many prominent conservatives loathe her strident atheism (one of her few appealing characteristics), and some even see fascism in her tracts. Whittaker Chambers famously wrote in the National Review, "Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's 'last men', both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Marnia... [In her vision] resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be wilfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and , in fact, reason itself enjoins them. From almost every page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, "To a gas chamber - go!""

But Rand's rabid anarcho-capitalism has clearly tapped into something primal in American conservatism: it is revealing that she is almost invariably described as an "idealist", rather than a maniac. She appeals to the ugliest side of Americanism (contrasting with its many, many strengths): a fear and hatred of the state, even in its most democratic form, and of wider collective action. Rand has only one conception of liberty -freedom from government. As one of her heroes, Howard Roark, says, "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is - hands off!" Like most of the American right, she has no conception of positive liberty. When asked how free a man in Harlem with no healthcare insurance and a kid with cancer is, she has no answer. She cannot see when hands have been kept too far off.

And - again like the rest of the American right - she finds it impossible to imagine a clash between the interests of the super-rich and the rest of society. While Rand is (rightly) appalled when the state kills people, she considers businessmen taking risks with the lives of ordinary people or government bureaucrats to be actually heroic. In Atlas Shrugged, the heroic Nat Taggart "murdered a state legislator who attempted to revoke a charter granted to him" and (ho, ho) "he had no trouble with legislators from then on." And that's not all: "He threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government." Anybody who tries to impose regulations to protect ordinary workers is "a louse." This is partly because she really does seem to see the rich as more deserving of life than the poor. She refers to the rich as "really alive," while ordinary people are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," "imitations of living beings." Who cares if the Ubermenschen take risks with these creatures? Who needs regulation?

Indeed, her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that when a railway worker in 'Atlas Shrugged' decides to punish the wicked socialist government by making a train crash happen, Rand implies the passengers had it coming. She runs through the politics of the train crash victims, implying they were accessories to the socialist government that is being justly punished: "The man in Bedroom A, Car No One, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that everything is achieved collectively, that it's the masses that count, not men... The woman in Roomette 10, Car No 3, was an elderly school teacher who who spent her life turning class after class of helpless schoolchildren into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that they must not assert their personalities, but do as others were doing." And so endlessly on, through over a dozen deserving victims. "There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas," she notes - so let them burn.

Rand did not even understand why her beloved capitalism works. She attributed its success to the unleashing of the "motive power" of a few rich men, a concept chillingly similar to Nietzsche's will-to-power. In fact, markets are a useful tool - provided they are checked by democratic regulation, a redistributive state and strong trade unions - for Haykian reasons, not Randian ones. Friedrich von Hayek saw that the strength of markets lies in their epistemological function: markets can access dispersed pockets of knowledge and process them better than any central planner. Look at the housing market, for example. Hundreds of thousands of dispersed home buyers sending signals about what kind of house they want by buying them is a far more effective way of gauging the kind of homes people actually want to live in than a central planner - however smart - trying to guess their desires. But Rand cannot see this reasoning. She cannot see that even if her beloved handful of geniuses did indeed go on strike, market economies would still be fairly efficient at generating wealth, and the world would carry on much as before. The genius (such as it is) resides in the system, not in a string of Ubermensch at the top gazing in horror at the imbecile masses.

But that is not the only flaw in her understanding of markets. She did not understand that the kind of pure selfishness she advocated would quickly corrode capitalism itself. The economist Alfred Marshall has shown that without "economic chivalry" - a willingness to stick by the rules, even when they work against your selfish interests - markets become unworkable. Only regulation by (cue thunder) the state can guarantee this chivalry. Rand's philosophy would simply create an unsustainable Enron economy of rip-off merchants - much as the Bush administration's bonfire of regulations has. But Rand could not see the dense interconnection between the market and the state: she spoke absurdly of establishing "a separation between government and economics" analogous to the constitutional separation between church and state. But without institutions of government like the police and courts, who would enforce contracts? Nor could she admit that the corporations she lauded as heroic were just as often beneficiaries of government subsidy as of market innovation. Wal-Mart, for example, is often supposed to be an icon of the success of the free market, when in fact it has - according to Multinational Monitor's investigations - received over $1bn in state subsidies.

Although Rand despised Russia, she was far more shaped by her Russian adolescence - and her interaction with Bolshevism - than she could ever have imagined. Even as she preached freedom, she created a personality cult around herself - sardonically dubbed The Collective - which permitted no dissent and even adhered to her list of banned books. Any dissent from the Leader's opinions was punishable by excommunication - a fate that even befell her lover, Nathaniel Braden, when he withdrew his sexual favours. She ended up creating a Leninism of the market fundamentalist right, based on the need for a small cadre of true believers to enact a violent revolution against the state (democratic or otherwise) that will usher in a utopian society without conflict, modelled on the Ideal Man of her own creation. Even her Objectivist epistemology reeks of Lenin's dialectical materialism.

It is a sweet, neat irony that the centenary of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls was marked by something she would have despised: an unprecedented burst of charitable giving in response to the corporate elite. No society, not even George Bush's America, could be run on Randian principles. When confronted with raw human need - or a single crying child - the elaborate reasoning behind Ayn Rand's off-the-peg morality for an off-their-head corporate elite melts. Yes, read The Fountainhead if you must - but as a guide to the philosophy that brought us skidding into the catastrophe, not a roadmap for how to get out.

~lee.

my life in twenty- five records...

2009-02-23T02:50:00.000-08:00

everyone knows about the "25 things" and recently there have been various "15/ 20/ 25 albums that meant a lot to you" or whatever going around and as such i've decided to combine the two. this essay is long, and definitely not for everybody. but if i "tagged" you you're in there somewhere.

dedicated to little lucy nelson and to evan greenwald. may you both find your own way a little more peacefully than i found mine.

[this essay can also be found at my blog: http://woolgathering-sf.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-life-in-twenty-five-records.html.]

my life in twenty- five records.

side one...the early years.

1. guns n' roses... "appetite for destruction."
2. the ramones... "mania."
3. jane's addiction... "nothing's shocking."
4. pearl jam... "ten."
5. jane's addiction... "ritual de lo habitual."
6. smashing pumpkins... "gish."
7. pearl jam... "vitalogy."
8. faith no more... "angel dust."
9. neil young... "harvest."
10. bob dylan... "bringing it all back home."
11. the beatles... "the beatles, aka the white album."
12. r.e.m.... "new adventures in hi- fi"
13. led zeppelin... "physical graffiti."

side two... college, etc..

14. ben harper... "fight for your mind."
15. the rolling stones... "exile on main street."
16. the beatles... "live at the bbc."
17. radiohead... "ok computer."
18. jeff buckley... "grace."
19. modest mouse... "the moon and antarctica."
20. wilco... "yankee hotel foxtrot."
21. neutral milk hotel... "in the aeroplane over the sea."
22. the clash... "london calling."
23. my morning jacket... "okonokos."
24. iron & wine... "our endless numbered days."
25. eddie vedder... "into the wild."

side one...the early years.

1. guns n' roses... "appetite for destruction."

it all really starts with "appetite."

before axl and slash came into my life there of course was music-- most notably poison, motley crue, and bon jovi. i was born in 1977. the drug, "hair metal," as it's come to be called, and mtv, its pusher, and me-- i feel like we all grew up in the same neighborhood.

that neighborhood was roswell, ga. i have a brother, cary, who is three years my junior. back then we did everything together. that he lives in miami, florida now, as opposed to in san francisco with me, does pain me a little-- though obviously i'm happy that he's happy.

like i said, back then we did everything together. if we weren't "playing guns" [we were like six and nine at the time] we were playing "rock stars." we knew all the moves and all the songs. our father had cut from a thin piece of plywood a couple of les paul- shaped guitars, which we decorated dutifully. they were our favorite toys.

it was all very sweet and innocuous. but by eleven years old, i was on the verge on puberty and along came guns n' roses. in 1988 guns n' roses were the biggest fucking band on the planet. there's absolutely nothing like them today [especially not guns n' roses].

"appetite for destruction" had been given to me [on cassette] by my fifth grade girlfriend, jessica oliver. she broke up with me the next day. i studied the liner notes, the artwork, the pictures. for me it was like the discovery of the dead sea scrolls. things that were troubling me, that i didn't understand-- suddenly they were very clear. it wasn't so much the lyrics or the subject matter of the songs [true story: my brother and i knew that if our mother caught wind of the swear words-- and there are a lot of them on "appetite"-- she would take away the tape for sure. i had where the swears were so memorized that when we'd be listening to it on our shitty little single deck tape player, and a swear would come up, i would turn the volume knob down then up really fast to mute it. we listened to it like that my whole fifth grade year], it was the guitar. slash's guitar work, for lack of a better way to describe it, really spoke to me in a language i could understand.

whether "appetite" is now thought of as a classic is probably up for debate. certainly i can see the arguments against. but for me, it's not only a classic, it was the beginning of something.

2. the ramones... "mania."

a habit i formed early, one i'm most proud of, was basically to notice what band t- shirts the bands i liked were wearing and then buy those other bands' tapes.

guns n' roses wore a lot of t- shirts. i learned about metallica, the sex pistols, and the rock club cbgb as a result of them. the ramones were another band [the most important to me] that i learned about. [when i think about it, i learned most of what i know about punk rock-- a lifelong passion of mine-- from two sources. what t- shirts gn'r wore, and from greg king, stewart king's older brother. he had the misfits, dead kennedys, g.b.h., d.r.i., m.o.d. [all the initial bands], and bad brains tapes that i so coveted when i'd spend the night at stewart's house during our sixth grade year. it should be noted that i've never spoken a word to greg, still to this day. but his 1989 7" and cassette tape collection will be forever burned into my brain.]

it wasn't until that next year, my thirteenth, that i got "mania," i think from drew stewart. i remember shooting baskets in the gym of the old sandy springs middle school with drew and learning the lyrics to "the kkk took my baby away." i remember being unable to write out the lyrics to "blitzkrieg bop." i remember thinking joey ramone looked like nothing i'd ever seen before.

i've since bought all the remastered ramones albums, at least the first five. i listen to them often, mostly in my car. but it only seems right to listen to "mania" on a shitty sony walkman, the kind where the deck is held in place with duct tape and the headphones keep slipping off because the silver band that goes around your head is so stretched out.

additionally i consider it a real point of pride that in 1995 some friends and i drove to new orleans to see the ramones and pearl jam play. this was during the great war with ticketmaster, and the show was at some out of the way stadium, and it was muggy as hell, and it was fucking awesome. long live the ramones.

3. jane's addiction... "nothing's shocking."

ah, the mighty jane's addiction. one of the greatest bands ever.

i got turned onto "nothing's schocking" in the seventh grade by adam zivony, who also turned me onto incense. i remember drinking some canadian club i'd snuck over, smoking cigarettes, burning incense, and listening to the second side, with "summertime rolls" and "mountain song" and "idiot's rule."

one of the things i always thought was coolest about perry farrell and jane's was that by the time their three album cycle was over, they had, in my opinion, encapsulated all there was to write about in terms of rock lyrics. personal freedom, love, sex, serial killers, mountains... they really covered it all.

later on, in high school, you'd be hard pressed to find a notebook of mine that didn't have some jane's addiction lyric on it. it would be something like this [picture my shitty high school handwriting]:

"you know the man you hate?
you look more like him everyday!
hi- di- hoa!
two good shoes won't save your soul!"

-p.f.

it is fifteen years later and i'm about to finish my first record. in the liner notes you'll find those words.

jane's addiction really was the perfect bridge, both for me and for the world, between the guns n' roses era and, uh, what would come next.

4. pearl jam... "ten."

what would come next, everyone knows, was nirvana's "nevermind." millions of essays have been written on "nevermind" and the seismic culture shift it caused so i will spare you.

"ten," its spiritual brother, caused a similar shift, and a parallel one was inside of me. it was like nothing before, or since. "ten" was like a religion for me.

i was in the eighth grade. axl rose was wearing kilts and starting riots, and i had a girlfriend named emily. i was still pretty hung up on guns n' roses-- though it was now the "use your illusion" years. all of a sudden, "grunge" was everywhere. "smells like teen spirit" had broken wide and it was a new world. soundgarden's "outshined," alice in chains' "man in the box", and pearl jam's "alive" were all in heavy rotation on mtv. craig halperin, i think, gave me a taped copy of "ten" and i listened to it endlessly. i finally got a real copy of it myself and pored over the liner notes-- which were so cool. the lyrics to the songs were all artfully presented, each individually [i remember "even flow" was just a dollar bill with the words to the chorus written around the edges and "jeremy" was all typed up on an old school typewriter].

knowing what i know about music now, the songs are pretty straightforward, but back then i really couldn't figure out what i was hearing, what was going on. [the mix still is a little strange-- really reverb- heavy. i'm glad brendan o' brien is taking a scalpel to it.]

what i did know, however, was that THIS WAS IT. this was the fuckin' SOUNDTRACK TO MY SOUL. obviously this sounds melodramatic and overwrought now but come on, man, i was fourteen. which brings us to emily.

the aforementioned emily snow jacobs was my eighth grade girlfriend, and my first true love. a teeny- tiny bit of me still is in love with emily from way back then. i trust that my wife understands.

i remember the first time i met emily was in the lunchroom in the seventh grade: i asked to borrow her math homework to copy it, and promptly lost it. fast forward to mrs. emerson's math class the next period, and we were checking said homework. emily got called on, and obviously she didn't have the answer. i got called on next and did. [she relishes telling this story, and does so every time we get together.]

anyway all eighth grade year emily and i dated, or went out, or went, or whatever the hell. we had about as tumultuous a relationship as two fourteen year- olds can. emily is a fantastic person, and i really truly love her deeply. but she can also be the most fucking frustrating person in the world. [i think she'd cop to that.]

i'm rambling, i know. i'll get to the point. "black," the fifth song on "ten," [the second to last song on the first side of the cassette, right before "jeremy"-- very important] was, and i guess still very much is, our anthem. i don't listen to "ten" much anymore, but when i hear the studio version of "black" on the radio, i think about emily jacobs. and i think about how crazy i was about her. and i get all gooey for that whole period of time, before high school.

the other standout track on "ten" obviously is "alive." two quick stories about "alive":

1. carrie shetler-- a friend of mine still, though now only through facebook-- and her mother were in a horrible car accident that eighth grade year. her mother was killed, and carrie was badly hurt, and it was a shock for our school. i remember her telling me much later that the first song she heard when she came out of her coma was "alive" and that it really had an incredibly healing effect on her, and that "ten" really helped her through that period of time.

2. it was the eighth grade dance. it was me and my crew [i wasn't the leader or anything]: jj ortega, alan hollander, and todd hodges. tami liptak was my date. emily was todd's, paige porter was jj's, and monica trinidad was alan's. the idea was that we all went not with our girlfriends, but with our best friends who were girls, but that obviously we would be hooking up with our girlfriends afterwards. jj lived in this castle up in alpharetta and we all went up there after the dance. i remember making out with emily on jj's bed, we were literally next to todd and paige doing the same thing. jj and tami were in his closet [i remember hilarious calls of "jj! come out of the closet!"] and alan and monica were, i don't know, somewhere else getting it on. todd jumped up from our makeout bed [everybody was clothed, just for the record] and threw on "ten" but he started it on track three, "alive" [some of us had moved onto cds by that point]. i think we high- fived each other and got back to business.

a few years later todd too was in a horrible car crash. i went to visit him in the hospital, held his hand as he lay there in the hospital bed, and sang "alive" to him softly. he died later that day.

pearl jam has remained one of my favorite bands, and "ten" probably still ranks as the one i've most listened to ever in the history of my life. it is a sacred artifact to me, and i take it personally when people disparage it, or the band, because it now seems easy or fashionable. so fucking watch out.

5. jane's addiction... "ritual de lo habitual."

i lost my virginity in the first few months of my ninth grade year to "three days" on the "ritual" album. enough said.

6. smashing pumpkins... "gish."

"gish" will always make me think of billy mosier. he turned me onto it on a church retreat my ninth grade year and it became the next album in what was becoming a pattern of "albums that i listened to nothing else but." it was another one of those records that sounded like nothing i had ever heard-- the drums, especially. billy and i became great friends on this retreat and soon after went together to see them play a five- dollar show at centerstage in midtown. it was effectively my first show [the poison show i went to in the fourth grade i do not count], thus beginning a lifelong habit of going to shows with billy. over the years we have really seen every major band you could think of. i have hundreds of ticket stubs from shows we went to see in high school-- 311, primus, lollapalooza, nine inch nails, dinosaur jr, pink floyd, beastie boys... really, and i mean really, if a band was coming into town, we'd go see 'em.

this was of course back in the days of waking up early on a saturday and going to turtle's [which became blockbuster music] and getting in line to get tickets. it was a ritual we had. he'd pick me up in the cadillac-- simultaneously the world's best and worst car-- and we'd head for bagels and coffee before landing at the turtle's across the street from my neighborhood. if my memory serves, they'd hand out lottery numbers at 9:30, 9:45 maybe, everybody'd line up in numerical order, and then tickets went on sale at 10:00.

by mid- tenth grade ticketmaster had struck a deal with publix and for a while we seemed to be the only people who knew that, so we were getting all sortsa great seats. soon enough though the cat was out of the bag and we were back to lines and lottery numbers. after a while we figured out that you had a better chance of getting good seats if you went to some out of the way publix, where there would be no line, so we'd drive down to ridiculous places like college park and lakewood to score.

we saw smashing pumpkins twice during the "gish" period, i think. that they recorded their follow- up record, "siamese dream," in atlanta had a lot to do with that fact. we saw them a few times after that, the last time being the 1995 [?] lollapalooza. but the "gish" period was the best for my money.

billy and i were roommates in college and have remained amazing friends all these years. he is in fact, and i swear this is true, flying up from san diego next weekend [27/ 29 february] to visit and see a show at the fillmore.

7. pearl jam... "vitalogy."

1994/ 1995 were hard years for me. "vitalogy" chronicled those years.

a few weeks into my eleventh grade year i dropped out of high school and moved out of my parents' house. it was the ridiculous, desperate, myopic act of an adolescent who was incredibly pissed off and trying to grow up too fast.

for whatever reason, my pain management skills have always included a heavy reliance on substances. in this instance my seventeen year- old pain was being treated with a lot of really shitty mexican pot. i was a fiend. i could not be sated, and i could not be stopped. whether or not i had more pain than some of my friends, i don't know. i had [have] some emotional problems. i can deal with them now. i could not back then.

my frustration with having just turned seventeen and feeling twenty- five reached a pinnacle sometime around october of 1994 and i left home. i moved in with some drug dealers i knew and basically dropped out of society. i had a job at papa john's pizza and no future, but i didn't care. i couldn't see past next month. i still to this day have no idea what was going on in my head during that period of time. i was really a fucking disaster. that i still have some very close friends from that period of time [billy, and danny simon] is more a testament to their patience with me than anything else.

it was during this period of time that i started experimenting with some more illicit substances-- acid, in particular. i tripped on acid a lot. the most i ever took was five hits at once. i was literally out of my mind, trying to achieve some william blake/ timothy leary/ carlos castaneda fantasy.

"vitalogy" was the perfect album for me through all this. it was all the things that i was: angry, sad, desperate, confused, frustrated. remember that "vitalogy" was the first pearl jam record to come out after kurt cobain's suicide, so there was that. it was also really the apotheosis of their fame, and the ticketmaster war was taking shape. all of this and more was in the songs, "not for you" and "corduroy" in particular.

additionally i don't think eddie vedder ever sounded better [say that five times real fast] than on "vitalogy." those performances are AMAZING. listen to the anger in "spin the black circle," "tremor christ," and "whipping." listen to the sadness in "nothingman." ah! what a great album. without it i don't know if i would've made it through that period of time.

8. faith no more... "angel dust."

but i did make it through that period of time, and when i did the album i remember listening to more than most was "angel dust." it was already a couple of years old by this point, but for whatever reason it really spoke to me. during this period of time i was getting ready for the g.e.d., which i got special permission to take a year early. i was starting community college in the fall when all of my friends were going into their senior year of high school. crazy how that turned out. i had gone from loser drug- addicted dropout insane person to starting college a year early. that being said, i have no salient memories of this period of time, really, no memories of moving out of that apartment and back into my parent's house, no memories of what i did when i was out with my friends [though i was still way into grass], no real memories at all. my "lost weekend."

9. neil young... "harvest."
10. bob dylan... "bringing it all back home."

there is no way to measure the remarkable and acute effect these two men have had on my life. it was at the beginning of that senior/ freshman year that i started really listening to dylan and neil, and i, like always, went truly overboard on them both.

"harvest" is still neil's most well- known record and as such it was the one i got started with. soon i had his entire discography basically. it was the same way with bob dylan. i went further and further into bob over those next few years, from seventeen until twenty- one, compared to that i've gone further and further with neil [likewise tom waits] these last few years, from twenty- eight let's say and still counting.

a great story about "bringing it all back home": "bringing" is the last truly acoustic recordings dylan would do for close to thirty years. and even at that, it's only the second side of the album that's acoustic [side one includes "subterranean homesick blues"]. "mr. tambourine man" is the first song on the side, and it was cut independently of the three songs that would follow it. the next three are "gates of eden," "it's alright, ma," and "it's all over now, baby blue," three of the longest, most poetic songs dylan's ever written. dylan recorded these three in order in one long, continuous take. he sat down with his guitar, made sure the engineer recording the session had enough tape, and just played those three songs boom boom boom in a row and that was the record. wow.

11. the beatles... "the beatles, aka the white album."

alongside neil and dylan we find the beatles in what was a huge shift in my music taste. this senior/ freshman year saw me really go from an "alternative rock" guy to a "classic rock" guy. i was bored with "alternative." kurt cobain was dead, pearl jam was basically underground. it was increasingly way more likely that you'd find me listening to creedence than my bloody valentine.

like everybody, i'm sure, my love affair with the beatles dated back to my childhood. i knew the songs, my mother was a big fan, i could play a couple on piano. the beatles were ubiquitous, you know? it wasn't until my seventeenth year that i really started listening to beatles albums, really starting getting into them.

and when i did, i went even crazier on them that i had ever gone before. crazier than for pearl jam, crazier than for bob dylan. to this day there is no band i am more insane about, that is to say really in love with, when it comes down to it, than the beatles. i could go on and on about them, about how in particular john lennon is my spiritual guru and how we all want to change the world. but there is nothing i could really say about the beatles that hasn't been said before, and so i'll just say that "the white album" is my favorite of all of their records.

12. r.e.m.... "new adventures in hi- fi"

one of the only current bands i really liked during this period of time was r.e.m.. i chose "new adventures" in particular, one because i think it's their most underrated record, and two, because i can really remember listening to this album a lot at the end of that senior/ freshman year. i was working at the coffee shop inside the borders books near perimeter mall in atlanta during the day, and delivering chinese food at night, listening to "new adventures," saving money for my eventual move to athens to continue college. i worked with adam cohn and danny simon, a few others sure but these two guys in particular stand out as my co- workers in the true, quotidian sense. we had a really good time, delivering for the mandarin house on roswell road.

adam still lives in atlanta and i see him-- alongside jj ortega, another terrific old friend of mine that i don't talk to near enough-- every time i go back to visit. the three of us have the quintessential "pick up right where you left off" friendship. i love those guys and would take a bullet for either one of them.

danny simon is probably the best guy i've ever known. certainly the smartest [in the eighth grade, danny circumvented all the alarm systems in our houses using, i think, magnets. it enabled us-- i mean this was like five or so different houses/ hooligans-- to be able to sneak out certain windows of our house with our parents asleep and our alarm systems still on. furthermore, he had wired up a sensor that alerted him to whether his parent's bedside table light was still on, so he could know whether it was safe to sneak out or not. a surreptitious wire ran from his parent's nightstand UNDER THE RUG and UP AND DOWN THE WALLS from their room to his. you give me internet access and a fucking week right now and i wouldn't be able to do that. and he was like thirteen.]. the two of us have been through so much together it is impossible to catalogue. truly. i think of him, and billy, as brothers-- equal with my own.

additionally danny is one of the funniest people i've ever met. he could've made a fortune in the fifties as a borscht belt comedy writer. but instead he got his phd in physics at uc santa cruz and now lives with his wife, rozalyn, and their beautiful daughter in sweden. i look forward to their visit in april. i wish they'd move back.

13. led zeppelin... "physical graffiti."

it was also during this period of time that i was in what i'd generously call "my led zeppelin phase." friends of mine would probably not be so kind. i was obsessed with zeppelin during this spring/ summer/ fall of 1996. i'd gotten the complete discography boxed set from the borders that i worked at and it was all i played, "physical graffiti" [their best] in particular. "in my time of dying" still is a song that ranks among my most favorite ever, not just of zeppelin but of all time. john bonham was a god.

side two... college, etc..

14. ben harper... "fight for your mind."

ben has always been an anomaly. he doesn't really fit in anywhere, and that's what i dig about him. i can relate to that.

billy turned me onto ben harper in spring of 1997. it was a new life for me, i was living in athens, on my own for what was basically my first time. [the dreaded drug den apartment i lived in i do not count.] i had quit smoking pot [even though you can basically buy it at whole foods here in sf, i remain drug- free].

i had recently gotten a dog, hodges, and also become a vegetarian. the two definitely went together, for the getting of hodges- bo- bodges [when he got neutered danny simon renamed him hodges- no- bodges, which stuck around for a minute] more or less sealed my vegetarian fate.

i was twenty and i was living with billy, rozalyn ayers [who'd later marry danny], and jeff hall. i was making a lot of mixed tapes during this period of time. huge, epic mixed tapes that have now been lost to the winds of time. the hugest, most epic series of mixed tapes came as a result of a break- up i had with a girl.

this person and i hung out for a month or so at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. basically it seemed like our whole relationship revolved around music. she lived a couple of streets over from me in normaltown and i was really, really into her. for a number of i'm sure good reasons it didn't work out and i was pretty broken up about it. i channeled that hurt into the most excellent series of mixed tapes that i'm convinced have ever been made. i mean it was to the point that i was going over to people's houses and borrowing their cds so that i could be as efficient as possible in making these huge, epic mixed tapes [most of my stuff was on vinyl and on cassette, and making tapes was just so much easier with cds]. i'd take home huge stacks of my friend's cds [alex reeves and drew kane immediately spring to mind] and spend all day and night stitching them together into this elaborate tapestry. it was all very dramatic and heart- on- my- sleeve [i was twenty after all]. the plan was to give her these tapes, thinking that she'd listen to them and realize what we had, or something. there were more than a few ben harper songs on those tapes: "walk away," "waiting on an angel," "forever," "another lonely day," "by my side." you get the picture. ultimately i guess i thought better of that, and i'm glad that i did because those tapes were awesome. i think i still have one or two of them somewhere in storage.

15. the rolling stones... "exile on main street."

following this episode i went on a real kind of chauvinist/ misogynist kick for a while and got really into "exile on main street." it seemed like a natural reaction at the time, to go on offense, but looking back it was just wounded youthful pride. bravado. whatever.

no matter. "exile on main street" is the greatest fucking rock and roll record ever made. i would recommend it, and a bottle of jameson irish whiskey of course, to anyone going through a break- up.

like i said earlier, i was living with rozalyn ayers at the time and i think that after the second month or so of me playing nothing but "exile" she actually hid it from me, and i can't say that i blame her. "exile on main street" is, i'm sure, the reason she moved out a few weeks later.

love you, rozy. thanks for still being my friend.

16. the beatles... "live at the bbc."

after all that sour i guess i needed some sweet. hence my love of "live at the bbc."

"live at the bbc" is just what it sounds like, a collection of all the appearances the beatles made on bbc radio in the early- to- mid 1960's. it's essentially a collection of covers, from artists like ray charles, elvis, chuck berry, little richard, buddy holly, the tin pan alley songs, early early motown, and the phil spector girl group stuff... all the stuff that influenced the beatles. alone it would be a definitive history of 1950's/ early 1960's pop music singles. couple that with the fact that they're all performed by the beatles, and it's truly one of the greatest albums ever.

17. radiohead... "ok computer."

"ok computer" IS the greatest album ever.

i don't care what you say. better than "sgt. pepper," better than "the velvet underground and nico," better than "blonde on blonde." at least that's my opinion. it's my favorite album of all time-- the only album that rivals "ten" for "most listened to album ever in the history of my life."

"ok computer" came out in 1997 but i didn't really start listening to it in earnest until about 2000. like i said, i had been going through this massive "classic rock" thing. i mostly hung out with kind of a hippie crowd, but i wasn't a hippie. [it should be noted that i had a real huge hair/ dylan- in- 1966 thing going on during this period that made the "i'm not a hippie" argument difficult. but i digress.] i was always way more led zeppelin/ stones than phish or the dead. but when i got into "ok computer," everything changed.

i couldn't stop listening to it. i was obsessed. i was enlightened. i was reborn.

while there was precedent for "ok computer" [think "sgt. pepper," think "the dark side of the moon"], i had to come by those records later in life as, obviously, they had been made before i was born. but for "ok computer" i was getting to be part of a paradigm- shattering masterpiece basically in real time. i was getting to be alive at the same time that this thing was going down. it was a privilege. it was an honor. i wanted to soak it all up.

the most important thing that should be noted about "ok computer"'s effect on me is that it really did snap me out of this bullshit "classic rock" trip i was on. obviously there's nothing wrong with the beatles and the stones but it was like i was consciously living in the past and not embracing what was happening during MY lifetime. "ok computer" showed me that i needed to be much more in the moment, that there was so much out there that i wasn't paying attention to. my lifelong passion for progressive politics were borne out of this realization, just in time for the 2000 election.

a final note about "ok computer": the years 2001- 2003 were my darkest, even darker than the "vitalogy" years of 1994/ 1995. my drinking was WAY out of control. i had been kicked out of the university of georgia and was in a truly terrible, go- nowhere relationship. i was once again without any direction, or care for my future-- i had totally tipped over. the difference between this time and the time before was that THIS time around i was in my mid- twenties and i kinda shoulda known better. [whatever that means.] i was really unsure if i was going to make it. i felt like i was going to die. i listened to "ok computer" over and over again, and when i would i would imagine that the closing strains of "lucky"-- the final instrumental chorus-- i would imagine that that just had to be what it sounded like when someone was dying and on their way to the next spiritual plane. and "the tourist," the song that follows "lucky," i'd imagine that's what it sounded like once you got there. i imagined myself so many times as that person.

incredible that the very same song, "lucky," includes the lines "kill me sarah, kill me again/ with love/ it's going to be a glorious day" and that i sing it to my wife now as a love song.

18. jeff buckley... "grace."

speaking of songs about love and mortality, jeff buckley's "grace" is a record that stands alone.

i came to "grace" a few years after jeff's death [he drowned in the wolf river, which is an offshoot of the mississippi, in 1997] by way of my brother [who told me he cried when he found out that they shared a birthday]. we were living together in athens and he had a big buckley poster on the wall. i had heard of him, remembered that he'd died, but i'd never listened to him. when i started to, i have to admit i really didn't get him at first. didn't like his voice, didn't like his riffs, didn't like his approach. found them... irritating.

i was not ready for him.

it was really only after another break- up that i finally was. i had been living with this girl who it turned out was, well not the devil incarnate exactly, but she certainly was no angel. it really wasn't even entirely her fault, she was coming immediately off a divorce and i was her rebound and i knew it and i fell for her anyway and when the inevitable happened i took it pretty hard. it probably didn't help that it was xmas time, the first xmas after september 11th.

it was a really strange time. good friends in my life were both coming [billy] and had gone [lara taylor sevener]. i was working three jobs, one at the globe barbacking/ working the door, one at the 283 bar working the door, and the third at earthfare [earthfare was like a mini whole foods] as a front end assistant manager. there was also an issue with school that i'll spare you, but let's just say it wasn't good and that i wouldn't be going back.

i had met this girl at the globe [the globe was at the time one of the best bars in athens. it was an irish- style pub, all wood, with a great staff. i had taken over kai from macha's monday night shift and worked my way up] and was smitten. soon enough we went home together and one thing turned into your mother and suddenly she was living at my house and we were spending whatever free time i had together. this went on all october- december 2001. it was an intense few months. i remember listening to coldplay's "parachutes" a lot, and to built to spill's "ancient melodies of the future," "kid a" had also just come out.

like i said, the inevitable happened and she slept with somebody else-- IN MY HOUSE. obviously there was no going back, but nonetheless i was stung. one of my very favorite people on the planet, lara taylor sevener [we'll get to her soon enough], had the most memorable thing to say about all of this: "lee, you can't get this girl out of your house fast enough." i will never forget her saying that.

i remember in breaking up with her quoting that great line from neil young, "funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way," and that was that. i soon started listening exclusively to mr. buckley. he really got me through that period of time.

"grace" is almost as important a record to me as "ok computer" or "ten" on a lot of levels and on some others it's actually even more important. [it should be noted that this fact has nothing to do now with the girl.] jeff buckley's voice, his guitar work [he used the absolute most difficult jazz chords to construct his songs outta], and the songs themselves haunt me to this day. to say that it is a terrible shame that he isn't around today making music is as facile a posit as i've ever heard, and it burns my finger typing the words.

19. modest mouse... "the moon and antarctica."

we gotta backtrack a little bit. there was no way to separate "ok computer" and "grace" thematically and as such i jumbled the chronology a bit. but "the moon and antarctica" does come between.

for three years, from age twenty until twenty three, i was in as serious a relationship as i had ever been in. it in fact stood as my longest relationship until i met my wife. out of respect for this person's privacy i'm going to leave out most of the graphic details. i will say this: those are pretty big years, or at least they were for me, and i learned a lot from this person and from that relationship. mostly i learned what not to do and how not to be. and for that i'm really grateful. i wish this person nothing but the best.

when it ended i was like a new man. i was working two jobs, one at the five points jittery joe's and the other at earthfare, though at this point i was only a checker/ bagger. i was jogging every day and in what is still the best shape of my life. my running tape was "the moon and antarctica." listening to it now, as i'm doing, i can literally see and smell milledge avenue, heading down it as i'd do from five points towards prince avenue, past the big intersection at baxter where the varsity was, on down past meigs and sometimes the grit, other times past the taco stand and dunkin' donuts and then past michael stipe's house to boulevard, ah, beautiful boulevard, still my favorite street of any street i've ever seen or been on.

at night i'd head out for drinks with the gang. the gang during this period of time i still think of as my all- star team [a notable exclusion being my wife]: billy mosier had just gotten back from one of his travels around the world, danny simon had just gotten back from living on an israeli kibbutz, lara taylor sevener and amy fouts had just finished law school. scott gilbertson, thomas hunter, and even rozy were floating around, too, and we were all in the summer town of athens, georgia. you could find us at 283 or the manhattan or the engine room or the go bar any night of the week with a maker's and blenheim in our hand. it was the summer before september 11th and everything was golden and glorious. i was having a lot of sex with this really cool tattooed chick who i hear now either lives in costa rica or north carolina but it was nothing serious [incidentally we went on vacation to new york city for labor day weekend, right before my twenty- fourth birthday. we in fact did the world observation deck in the south tower of the world trade center. it was monday, september 3rd, 2001].

many of my experiences that summer seemed like they had been foretold in the r.e.m. song "nightswimming," which of course is on their masterpiece "automatic for the people." it was during this period of time that i was occasionally hanging out with michael stipe. we had some friends in common and had a couple of conversations with him [i remember one specifically the two of us had about the rolling stones. michael was totally flabbergasted by the fact that they had been together forty years] and we did a few shooters together, mostly at the go bar. i mention this because the other album i remember listening to a lot during this period of time was "reveal," by r.e.m.. it's a small world as we know it, and i feel fine.

20. wilco... "yankee hotel foxtrot."

"yhf" reminds me of the year 2002, and of working in athens. i worked a lot of places in athens. over the course of the years 1997- 2003, i worked at the five points mellow mushroom, the downtown mellow mushroom, blue sky coffee, jittery joe's at five points, jittery joe's on prince, the globe, the 283 bar, the five and ten, earthfare, helix, five star day, and the speakeasy. i'm sure i'm leaving a couple out.

in 2002 i think i mostly worked at the 283 bar, the globe, the five and ten, and helix. this was of course the height of tipped- over alcoholic irresponsibility. i've never had much time for regret, i figure everything that's happened's happened and there's nothing i can do plus it led to me to where i sit right now typing and there's no place that i'd rather be. but the way i conducted myself at those four jobs, 283 not so much but definitely the globe [where i was constantly drunk, and finally fired for having sex in the basement on shift], the five and ten [still the nicest restaurant i've ever worked at, and one i did not appreciate at the time. [[farm 255 downtown in athens will forever be my favorite restaurant that i've ever worked at.]] i was never especially drunk on shift at the five and ten, it was always more a slap- happy half hung over kinda thing. unless it was sunday brunch, in which case i would always be massively hung over/ still very drunk from the night before], and especially helix [where my behavior was the probably the worst, totally inexcusable: i'd show up hung over as shit every day at ten when we opened and would sleep in the back until after lunch time. i remember when i was finally fired marie claire, the manager, asked me, "i mean, you're not surprised are you?"]. the way i treated those places and those people-- chuck bussler, krista merry, robert sampson-- still nags at me a little bit and it's probably one of my biggest sources of regret.

21. neutral milk hotel... "in the aeroplane over the sea."

i can pinpoint for you what is definitely my biggest source of life regret like it's you asking me my birthday: being in the same fucking town at the same time as neutral milk hotel during the "in the aeroplane over the sea" period and never seeing them live. it was only much later [around 2003] that i finally "GOT" "aeroplane." that i missed untold opportunities to see the history that was neutral milk being made provides me an unending sense of frustration.

22. the clash... "london calling."

i feel essentially the same way about "london calling": how did i not have this album for so long? obviously it came out in january 1980 and i was like barely two, but come on, it shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to finally get it.

"london calling" reminds me a lot of when i moved from athens to atlanta in the summer of 2003. i was in what i thought was a very serious relationship at the time with a flight attendant [surprise! it turned out not to be] and had been basically asked to leave athens, georgia. i got in touch with my old friend ken mcclain, who had been living in florida, and we decided to meet in little five points and band together once again.

we settled into a house in candler park-- ken, kim and me. kim [i honestly can't remember her maiden name] was my friend and she was going to be our third roommate. kim and ken fell in love in little under a week i think and got engaged. i performed their wedding ceremony on the beach in savannah, georgia in september of 2003 and though we don't really keep in touch [much to my dismay] they are still very much together.

atlanta was fun. i worked first at one midtown kitchen, a very hip and happening spot basically on the back side of piedmont park. it was at one that i met jessie, a super badass woman who became my best friend after i stopped flying the flight attendant's friendly skies. jessie was [is] fucking awesome, a true original. we spent a lot of time together, mostly at the righteous room and at 97 estoria, smoking cigarettes, doing shots, and talking about life. everybody thought we were in love and didn't know it but that was just never the case. we knew what we had-- a really killer friendship-- and we were content with that. she lives in chicago now and i figure that as long as she's being true to herself she must be doing awesome.

i soon left one midtown kitchen for bartending and waiting tables at spice restaurant. spice was a very very hip spot right in the middle of midtown atlanta and my professional home for two years or so. the staff at spice was pretty amazing when i think about it even if i didn't fully appreciate them at the time. i had a lot of fun working there and made good money.

[my two favorite spice stories are these: the first is that, like i said, the restaurant is right in the heart of midtown atlanta but it is especially at the very center of the african american tranny hooker nexus. these gals were fun, we'd kid with them from time and it was always fun to watch them cruise 5th street. what was not fun was that every sunday brunch you had to go around the building-- spice was a free- standing three- level antebellum home that had been converted into a very modern looking industrial space, and it had a large outside space-- with a dustpan and a broom and sweep up all of saturday night's used condoms.

my second favorite spice story is about the late- night buy- out parties we'd have. the two most famous were "brother 2 brother" and what i can only call "the swingers club." "brother 2 brother" was an organization for young, african american homosexuals. it would go like this: we'd close down the restaurant by 11:30 or so and get everybody out. we'd then stack up all the tables off in a corner, leaving the dining room pretty open. a dj would come in and set up and then all of a sudden BOOM! midnight would hit and these fellas would start showing up, literally by the hundreds. it was beautiful really, all these gay hip hop boys in sunglasses that cost three times as much as my shoes. these boys could fucking DRINK. it would be me and my two bartending compatriots, jennifer and gina, and we would just be speed bartending for three solid hours, only stopping to feed each other shots. we'd clean up and walk out with like three hundred extra dollars on top of whatever we'd already made that night. it was a gas.

"the swingers club" was entirely another matter. somehow-- it was never made clear to me-- we got rented out by a swingers association. basically what that means is that i got to bartend at a public orgy, literally a bunch of naked people walking around having sex with each other in full view of everyone [[including me, jenn, the general manager chris, and the mexican busboy daniel]] for a couple of hours. it was surreal, like something out of "caligula" or "eyes wide shut." one example that i remember really clearly is that this naked woman-- fairly attractive-- went down on this other naked woman-- again, fairly attractive-- in front of about eight of us. [[i was furiously smoking cigarettes and doing shots while this was all going on.]] when she finally came everybody applauded.]

my favorite thing about spice, though, for about the longest time, was that lara would come and visit me once or twice a week.

lara taylor sevener was one of the first people i ever met when i moved to athens in 1997 [she and billy were a year older than me and already good friends]. we got close in 2000 and i still consider her one of my very best friends-- a family member alongside billy and danny-- and my personal [and forever] wartime consigliere.

lara has always been someone i've looked up to. she knew everybody, always had something hilarious, profound, or hilariously profound to say, and she's always looked fucking great. to me it's always been a bitchin' card trick and an impressive juggling act.

lara grew up in baton rouge, louisiana, but you'd know that immediately upon meeting her. her accent literally speaks for itself. it's as refined-- not coarse, like so many southern accents-- as pillowy cotton. it has the air of southern aristocracy while at the same time it has a downhome everyman thing that immediately puts you at ease.

she has a quicksilver mind, one of the fastest i've ever seen. it's the thing i've always respected the most about her. she has a way with words that would put mark twain, winston churchill, bob dylan, and willie shakes [billy, thomas hunter, and i lived together for a year in 1998, my junior year in college. of course we had a party pretty much the first thing we did and at that party lara wrote on our roomates- only message board the very first line from "twelfth night": "if music be the food of love, play on! --willie shakes." it stayed on the board all year.] all in their place. i could think of no better way to honor that talent, and our friendship, than to give her what was effectively the keynote speech at our wedding. she repaid me a year later by asking me to give the second reading during she and steve's wedding service.

it's very, very, very easy to write about her, she's such a character. i'm crazy about her. i could tell you story after story but you'd probably think i was embellishing, or worse. so i'll just say this: lara taylor sevener is one of my favorite people on the planet and i am a better person for knowing her. she's helped me through countless catastrophes in my life and i really don't know where i'd be without her. i made her a copy of "london calling" a couple of years ago. i hope she still has it.

a very serious final note: lara was almost killed in a car accident last year on the day before my birthday [her husband, steve, WAS hurt really badly-- lara more or less was physically fine and steve has since made a full recovery], reiterating [and solidifying] my belief that a car is nothing more than a speeding bullet indiscriminately looking for a target. to say that i would have been destroyed had anything truly permanent happened to her is like saying that it's unfortunate that the world trade center is not there anymore.

23. my morning jacket... "okonokos."

the reason that i said earlier that "my favorite thing for the longest time about spice was that lara would come visit" is because spice is also where i met my wife, sarah.

sarah schoff and i met on july 2nd, 2004. it was a friday night and i was off work. i was up there anyway on the other side of the bar, drinking free drinks with a couple of girlfriends when i noticed a couple of seats down this woman that i was sure i knew. she was beautiful, with pale white skin and jet black, silky hair.

it turns out she was sure she knew me too. she was there with a couple of her girlfriends, counseling one of them through her first big fight with her boyfriend [now husband] and just generally blowing off some steam. they had come to visit the girls, jenn and gina, my co- workers. jenn and gina were fantastic bartenders ["cocktail engineers"] and fantastic people, both with larger- than- life personalities and killer senses of humor. thank god for them, for otherwise sarah and i would never have met.

so the girls [sarah plus her two, and jenn and gina] were all talking and i guess sarah asked them about "the guy with the chops." [i had pretty large sideburns at the time.] they immediately were like, "lee?! you mean lee?! oh he works here and he's great and you should totally go talk to him."

sarah's always been a woman of action, and she seized on the moment. she pushed her way through the two girls i was sitting between, bummed a cigarette off of me, and told me a joke about an italian guy who was fucking another italian guy's wife. it was pretty bold, and very sexy. she had me locked in her tractor beam.

the two girls i was with, i swear they evaporated into plumes of smoke and suddenly sarah and i were engrossed in a conversation that was volleying back and forth between woody allen, bob dylan, her childhood, my childhood, more jokes [i've got a few in my repertoire], and god knows what else. talking to her was like looking into the future. soon enough we were kissing, right there at the bar, right in front of her friends and my co- workers.

the bar at spice was proving to be too small for the atomic energy we seemed to be getting off each other, however, and so we bar- hopped around the rest of that night, finally ending up back at her place. two days later i moved in.

our first few months together were insane. i'd take off whole weeks of work just to stay in bed with her. those first few months we vacationed in lake tahoe, and in new york city, and in asheville, north carolina. we did xmas at her parent's house in sacramento. overall, the sheer weight and fury of the chemical reactions transpiring would have flattened any other two people. call me hyperbolic and self- aggrandizing all you like. you weren't there.

sarah mattie schoff was born in a little town called adamant, vermont. she and her brother, jessup, who is two years her senior, were raised on a farm. the children of hippie parents. her upbringing couldn't have been any different from my suburban one [and probably many of yours]: they killed or picked all their own food, wore handmade clothes [sarah wore her brother's hand- me- downs], and they had to go to the bathroom either in an outhouse or in an old coffee can. their house was heated only by firewood, which they had to chop, and during the brutally cold vermont winters they slept in as many layers as it took to keep warm.

when sarah was thirteen the family moved to sacramento, california, where her father, charlie, was born and raised. i can remember sarah telling me the first time she saw central heat and air she was like, "why the hell have we been chopping wood this whole time?" she had several run- ins with the cool kids who took advantage of her naivete before settling in with a good group of folks, many of whom she keeps up with today [and did before facebook].

she studied hard in school and went to college at chico state and graduate school at the university of arizona, getting a master's degree in public health and nutrition. she did her residency in the cancer ward of a hospital. by age twenty- eight she had reached the top of her field, working just beneath the director of nutrition at one of the most prestigious and exclusive resort and health spas in the world. it was there that she met an australian billionaire that swept her off her feet. they were together for a few years, and married for a little while. the relationship was tumultuous at best. about nine months after they finalized their divorce we got together.

in the almost five years that we've been together [married almost two], we broke up twice. the first time was in the summer of 2005, just after our first anniversary. it was necessary but it was awful and i truly fell apart, like a paper mache doll that had been dropped into a bucket of rubbing alcohol and left to disintegrate. i spent my nights and all my money at bars around atlanta and when i'd get home i'd just collapse on the couch and stare cross- eyed at the television. hurricane katrina and the launch of stephen colbert's show "the colbert report" happened during this period of time. i was living with my brother in decatur and looking back it's remarkable both that he still speaks to me and that he didn't have me committed. i was a broken man. i was sure this time that i was going to die.

we got back together just as sarah was moving to san francisco and consequently i started planning on moving there myself. life was full of promise but there was something still rotten in the state of denmark. i just couldn't put my finger on it.

there were undeniable and seemingly intractable problems-- barriers to tranquility-- that we had. sarah was five years older than i was, for one. our age difference now is no big deal, hardly noticeable. but the difference between twenty- eight and thirty- three to us was huge and palpable. visceral.

that she was the former wife of a billionaire was another. heh heh you say but i was a struggling fucking bartender and she was like liz taylor. she wasn't an asshole with or about her money [she's in fact one of the most generous people i know] or anything like liz taylor, but the comparison is apt nonetheless. maybe you could say she was more like gwyneth paltrow or somebody like that. the point is she had money and i didn't and that fact was not lost on either of us.

caution to the wind and consequences be damned and all that i set off towards the sunset anyway, with my clothes and some humble possessions. i took up with her in her fourth floor pacific heights apartment and tried to find work. i finally got lucky with a temp agency [i have never been the most employable motherfucker] and started to put roots down. it was about this time that sarah broke up with me.

i was stunned. i had left my life and moved across the country for this woman. and she broke up with me. it was a feeling i can only equate with what bungee jumping or skydiving-- or jumping off a tall building or bridge to your death-- must feel like. [it should be noted that we've been back together and married for a while now and still i have panicky holy- shit- i'm- falling nightmares about her breaking up with me and kicking me out.]

i packed my meager possessions and left. i knew i couldn't stay in sf as i really didn't know anybody else, and i knew i didn't want to move back to atlanta as i really fucking hated it there. so i moved back to athens.

it was july in athens and i had sold my car when i'd moved out to sf, so i was walking everywhere and riding a bike. it was hell. turns out it's really really hot in georgia in the summertime. i was born there and had lived there all my life, so it wasn't like this was a galloping shock or anything. but still, the difference between georgia and sf in july in terms of weather is like the difference between venus and the moon.

i got through the sticky inferno of july and august, found work, reconnected with some friends [ck koch, elizabeth tanner], and made some new ones [lera lynn, michael boatright]. it was a good time. i had been through atlanta and sarah and everything and i was just going to go back to what i was comfortable with, what i knew, and more importantly what i knew i liked. only this time i wasn't going to be so mickey- rourke- in- "barfly" about it.

the biggest problem sarah and i ever had was me figuring out who i was. when we met i was a lovable and lovably irresponsible good time charlie twenty- six year old bartender. wanting to be with this woman, i tried to "grow up" real fast and "get a job" so that i could be someone that she could love and be with. there was nothing natural about the progression. it was more like going through the windshield after the impact of a car wreck.

and a fucking car wreck it was. and this went on for YEARS.

so i had decided that i was just going to be myself, and just be accountable to myself. i had a bike, a four hundred dollar a month rented house, a couple of good jobs, and inner peace. and then she called.

i couldn't believe it. it was clear that she missed me [it had been six months] and that she felt she had made a mistake-- did she want me back? i didn't know what i thought about that. of course i still loved her, and of course i was still in pain. was i ready to go through it all again?

i was. sarah got on a plane and came to athens for a week. that was december. in january i packed up my things once again and moved westward, once again. in nine months i had moved nine thousand miles-- once to sf, once back to georgia, and then back to sf.

it turns out sarah breaking up with me and me moving back to athens was the best thing that ever happened to us. it gave us time to breathe deeply and find ourselves again, decide what was important to each other as individuals, and just as importantly decide what was entirely unimportant to each other as individuals. i had spent so much time trying to "grow up" and "be normal" so that she could love me and be with me that i was blind to the fact that she DID love me and she WAS with me. and again, this went on for YEARS. it was only after i was back on my own and i realized that i was probably never going to "grow up" and "be normal" did i feel like the person that she fell in love with in the first place.

i'm not saying i was entirely at fault for our troubles. sarah certainly had her fair share of bullshit during our relationship, and it was during this same period of independence that she rectified a lot and grew and found a new level of understanding about herself, and about us.

we got engaged on january 2nd, 2007 and married on july 14th of the same year. it was a beautiful wedding, and we honeymooned in dublin, london, paris, and amsterdam for two weeks.

i have never met a more amazing woman. my wife is brilliant, and hilarious, and twisted, and beautiful, and graceful, and kind. she is a tremendous chef. she is fantastic in bed. she has a killer singing voice. she is a true artist when it come to interior design. she is like a mystical earth mother to all the children and animals that cross her path. she has the world's best smile. she helps me be a better human being. she never lets conventional wisdom, be it about a homeless person or a republican, cloud her judgment or allow her to act in error or in anything other than the best interest of humanity. she is my sunshine. she is the ceiling of the sistene chapel to me. she is my "white album." she has a great ass. she is the mama bunny.

this has very little to do with my morning jacket's live album "okonokos," other than that they are one of my favorite bands and that both their records "it still moves" and "z" were out during this period of time, and it's my opinion that all those songs sound better live.

"okonokos," additionally, is the best fucking live album EVER, and, to paraphrase steve earle, i will stand on "live at leeds" and "get yer ya- ya's out" and all the others' coffee table in my boots and say so.

24. iron & wine... "our endless numbered days."
25. eddie vedder... "into the wild."

these last two records really say where my head is at these days. i'm a little mellower, a little slower, a little more reserved... for the most part. like the old saying goes: "everything in moderation, including moderation."

"our endless numbered days" is a record about love and family. it's themes are evocative both of childhood and of the idea of home, of family, of domesticity. i wrote a song for my mother on my record that i hope lyrically doesn't lean too heavily on some of the songs included in this set.

and "into the wild" is just AMAZING, alone and especially as a companion piece to the movie. both works [the album and the movie] have had a huge influence on me in that i just so respect artists who are honest and have vision and the courage to go after those visions, to try to make them materialize. that's what i've tried to do, both with my music and with this essay. thanks for being a part of it.

~lee.

accountability now...

2009-02-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

[from the huffington post...]

'Accountability Now': Bloggers And Progressive Groups Plan To Challenge Elected Dems

by sam stein

Some of the most prominent names in progressive politics launched a major new organization on Thursday dedicated to pinpointing and aiding primary challenges against incumbent Democrats who are viewed as acting against their constituents' interests.

Accountability Now PAC will officially be based in Washington D.C., though its influence is designed to be felt in congressional districts across the country. The group will adopt an aggressive approach to pushing the Democratic Party in a progressive direction; it will actively target, raise funds, poll and campaign for primary challengers to members who are either ethically or politically out-of-touch with their voters. The goal, officials with the organization say, is to start with 25 potential races and dwindle it down to eight or 10; ultimately spending hundreds of thousands on elections that usually wouldn't be touched.

"Most of the time, regardless of your record in Washington, an incumbent does not have to worry about being challenged in a primary," explained Jeff Hauser, an online Democratic operative who will serve as the group's executive director. "This only increases the power of the Washington echo chamber and the influence of lobbyists. We are trying to change that... We think there are potentially talented challengers out there who think the process of mounting a primary challenge is simply too daunting. When you bring to bear the resources of national organizations and the influence of the netroots, you can help these potential candidates."

It is a concept bound -- indeed, designed -- to ruffle the feathers of powerful figures in Washington, in part because the names behind it are now institutions themselves. With $500,000 currently in the bank, Accountability Now will be aided, in varying forms, by groups such as MoveOn, SEIU, Color of Change, Democracy for America, 21st Century Democrats and BlogPAC. FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher and Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald will serve in advisory roles, while Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos will conduct polling, with analytical help from 538.com's Nate Silver.

"This will be very much interactive and localized," said Hamsher. "We are already going out to local state blogs to help us identify well-qualified candidates in their communities. Once those people are identified we will be able to bring the strength of our resources to help them mount primary challenges."

In a conversation with the Huffington Post, Hauser, Hamsher and Greenwald said that the process by which targeted incumbents were chosen would not constitute an ideological litmus test. The goal, they noted, was simply to follow the numbers: figure out which Members were casting votes that were out of tune, philosophically speaking, with their constituent's public opinion readings. And then bear the most basic form of political pressure: encourage a primary challenger to run and help him or her campaign. Fundraising will be done by galvanizing online support for specific races -- a practice now natural to Accountability Now's principals.

The overarching premise would be to break down the power of incumbency. But the side effects would be equally lucrative: putting members on notice that their votes have consequences and offering a support structure to aspiring progressives.

"We want to normalize the idea that Democratic incumbents can be challenged...and to the extent that we can legitimize that you can then open up the conversation, causing even the good incumbents in Washington to endorse primary challengers as a means to make the political class more responsive," said Greenwald. "We want to destroy the taboo against challenging politicians from within their own party."

And yet, not everyone is bound to be on board, least of all official Washington. Protecting incumbency is, as Accountability Now's founders are acutely aware, one of D.C.'s foremost operating principles (in 2008, only 23 incumbents lost their House races and only four of those losses came in the primary). And there is a reason for it. Political power comes in the form of numbers and unity. As such, keeping the majority intact often takes precedent over ideological purity. Rep. Donna Edwards' victory over ethically challenged Al Wynn in 2008 -- a template for what Accountability Now seeks to do in 2010 -- was one of the few cases that went against the grain.

But in private, some Democrats expressed worry about pushing for progressive change from the outside rather than from within. Would running an election opponent be the best measure of political persuasion? What if, hypothetically, a primary challenger won the nomination only to lose in the general?

These are concerns that Accountability Now does not take lightly. They insist that they will "take district realities into account," which means that Democrats who represent moderate districts will be forgiven for their moderate votes. But beyond that, they argue, it is the candidate's responsibility, not theirs, to ensure reelection.

"No incumbent worth their salt should lose in a primary -- their advantages are considerable, and so to be vulnerable indicates a considerable focus on K Street, not Main Street," said Hauser. "A primary is the height of democracy, a two-year job performance review -- what is wrong with having to listen to constituents as well as D.C. lobbyists and groupthink."

~lee.

couldn't agree with this more...

2009-02-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

[from the ny times...]

No Lunch Left Behind

By ALICE WATERS and KATRINA HERON

Berkeley, Calif.

THIS new era of government bailouts and widespread concern over wasteful spending offers an opportunity to take a hard look at the National School Lunch Program. Launched in 1946 as a public safety net, it has turned out to be a poor investment. It should be redesigned to make our children healthier.

Under the program, the United States Department of Agriculture gives public schools cash for every meal they serve — $2.57 for a free lunch, $2.17 for a reduced-price lunch and 24 cents for a paid lunch. In 2007, the program cost around $9 billion, a figure widely acknowledged as inadequate to cover food costs. But what most people don’t realize is that very little of this money even goes toward food. Schools have to use it to pay for everything from custodial services to heating in the cafeteria.

On top of these reimbursements, schools are entitled to receive commodity foods that are valued at a little over 20 cents per meal. The long list of options includes high-fat, low-grade meats and cheeses and processed foods like chicken nuggets and pizza. Many of the items selected are ready to be thawed, heated or just unwrapped — a necessity for schools without kitchens. Schools also get periodic, additional “bonus” commodities from the U.S.D.A., which pays good money for what are essentially leftovers from big American food producers.

When school districts allow fast-food snacks in the lunchroom they provoke widespread ire, and rightfully so. But food distributed by the National School Lunch Program contains some of the same ingredients found in fast food, and the resulting meals routinely fail to meet basic nutritional standards. Yet this is how the government continues to “help” feed millions of American schoolchildren, a great many of them from low-income households.

Some Americans are demanding better. Parent advocacy groups like Better School Food have rejected the National School Lunch Program and have turned instead to local farmers for fresh alternatives. Amid steep budgetary challenges, these community-supported coalitions are demonstrating that schools can be the masters of their own menus. Schools here in Berkeley, for example, continue to use U.S.D.A. commodities, but cook food from scratch and have added organic fruits and vegetables from area farms. They have cut costs by adopting more efficient accounting software and smart-bulk policies (like choosing milk dispensers over individual cartons), and by working with farmers to identify crops that they can grow in volume and sell for reasonable prices.

Many nutrition experts believe that it is possible to fix the National School Lunch Program by throwing a little more money at it. But without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing will only create a larger junk-food distribution system. We need to scrap the current system and start from scratch. Washington needs to give schools enough money to cook and serve unprocessed foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. When possible, these foods should be locally grown.

How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year, plus a one-time investment in real kitchens. Yes, that sounds expensive. But a healthy school lunch program would bring long-term savings and benefits in the areas of hunger, children’s health and dietary habits, food safety (contaminated peanuts have recently found their way into school lunches), environmental preservation and energy conservation.

The Agriculture Department will have to do its part, by making good on its fledgling commitment to back environmentally sound farming practices and by realizing a separate program to deliver food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, from farms to schools. It will also need to provide adequate support for kitchens and healthy meal planning. Congress has an opportunity to accomplish some of these goals when it takes up the Child Nutrition and Women Infants and Children Reauthorization Act, which is set to expire in September.

But the Department of Education should take some initiative, too. After all, eating well requires education. We can teach students to choose good food and to understand how their choices affect their health and the environment. The new school lunch program should be partly financed by the Department of Education, and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, should oversee it. Vice President Joseph Biden should also come to the table by making school lunch a priority of his White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families.

Every public school child in America deserves a healthful and delicious lunch that is prepared with fresh ingredients. Cash-strapped parents should be able to rely on the government to contribute to their children’s physical well-being, not to the continued spread of youth obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other diet-related problems. Let’s prove that there is such a thing as a good, free lunch.

Alice Waters is the president of The Chez Panisse Foundation. Katrina Heron is a director of the foundation and a co-producer of civileats.com.

~lee.

regarding foie gras...

2009-02-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

[from the village voice...]

Is Foie Gras Torture?

By Sarah DiGregorio

It's very hard to watch the video about foie gras from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and not conclude that you should lay off fatty liver.

You're shown a disheveled duck squeezed into a cage so small that the bird can't open its wings. Disturbingly, it rocks back and forth. You then see an enormous barn full of birds, all of them immobilized in tiny cages. There are graphic shots of birds' festering open sores with rats nibbling at them, some that are dying slowly, and some with holes punched through their necks. We learn that foie gras production has been banned in the United Kingdom, Israel, and Switzerland.

The Humane Society and the ASPCA have also joined PETA to oppose foie gras. They object to the force-feeding process, called "gavage," which entails putting a metal tube down a duck's throat to deliver a large amount of corn-based food that causes the liver to enlarge. The process, animal rights groups say, causes trauma to the duck's esophagus and beak. Also, they say, the enlargement of the liver—from six to 10 times the normal size—causes the ducks to become deathly ill, struggle to walk and breathe, and vomit up undigested food. At the website of the humane group Farm Sanctuary, a photograph of a healthy, fluffy white duck rescued from a foie gras farm is contrasted with a shot of two ducks in tiny cages, both covered with their own yellow vomit.

"I am disturbed by the rough handling that creates myriad lesions—fractured limbs and infections of their feet," says Dr. Holly Cheever, vice president of the New York Humane Society, a veterinarian, and an occasional consultant to PETA. "Pneumonia and esophageal scarring, fungal and bacterial infections, and, in rare cases, the rupture of the liver from excess pressure on a badly swollen organ—not to mention the semi-comatose and seizuring states I have seen in the end stages as the liver fails and the brain can no longer function . . . yet, the feeder will grab a seizuring or semi-comatose bird and force the tube down to continue the process of liver engorgement. Surely you do not need a veterinary affidavit to label this as cruel?" Cheever says that the esophagi are often "blown open" and that the fattened liver becomes profoundly diseased, which causes the birds to die a slow death, beset with seizures and unable to walk.

Groups that oppose the production of foie gras have pushed for city and state bans on the product, sometimes with success, as in California, and sometimes with temporary success, as in Chicago. Meanwhile, various groups continue to hold demonstrations outside restaurants that serve the product, and the Humane Society has brought lawsuits against a local farm.

After watching the gruesome images, it's not hard to understand the legislative concern. No one wants tortured ducks on their watch. After all, we adore ducks—Daffy, Donald, even the Aflac duck—because we find them funny and appealing, much more so than chickens or turkeys.

However, in some cases, legislators have reversed course. In 2007, New York State Assemblyman Michael Benjamin withdrew his name from a proposed bill banning foie gras production in the state after he visited the biggest foie gras farm in the country, Hudson Valley Foie Gras.

What did he see there? Fortunately, Hudson Valley is only about two hours from the city. I figured the only way to know for sure whether foie gras equals torture was to go see it produced for myself. I called a contact at the gourmet food company D'Artagnan, which works closely with Hudson Valley, and asked if I could look around. I'd want to see the force-feeding. And the slaughter. And bring a photographer.

"No problem," came the reply.

In the United States, foie gras production is tiny compared to other animal husbandry. There are four American foie gras farms, and all raise ducks rather than geese, selling not only livers but also breast and leg meat, sausages made with scraps, and down from the feathers. Hudson Valley offers duck testicles and duck tongues, too.

And although Hudson Valley is the biggest foie gras producer in the country, processing 4,000 to 6,000 ducks a week, it raises birds by the traditional model, instead of the industrial one. That means that everything—from the egg hatching to the 21-day force-feeding period and the slaughter—happens on the same farm, tended to by the same workers. So I'd be able to see it all.

When I told Cheever that I was visiting Hudson Valley, she said that I'd be witnessing an elaborate cover-up. "With 150 people living on-site, they can cherry-pick out the disastrously sick ducks," she said. She also didn't believe that the farm force-feeds for only 21 days before slaughtering the ducks. "By the end of the third to fourth weeks, their breathing is strained and their limbs may be lame from infection and injury or fractures, but YOU will not see those birds," she wrote to me in an e-mail.

Hudson Valley Foie Gras is not actually in the Hudson Valley, but in a sparsely populated, rather desolate town called Ferndale in the Catskills region. First stop was the home of Marcus Henley, the farm manager at Hudson Valley, who lives with his wife, Sohnnie (pronounced "Shaun-ie"), on 12 acres, with a black cat, a canary, and some koi. Both are from Arkansas. Henley studied science in college, served in the Army, and then started managing poultry farms in 1983. He came to Hudson Valley in 2001.

On their kitchen table, they'd laid out a spread of products from the farm. There was duck confit, smoked duck breast, deviled duck eggs, duck prosciutto, torchon of foie gras, and foie gras butter—a heart-stopping concoction of rendered foie gras fat and black truffles. The Henleys are 95 percent vegetarian, for health reasons, so this meal was unusual for them.

Henley shrugged when I asked him about the first time he had tried the product. "A boy from Arkansas doesn't get a lot of chance to eat foie gras," he said. I told him that I'd spoken with Cheever, and that she insisted I would not be allowed to see the ducks in the later stages of force-feeding and that the sick ducks would have been removed so I couldn't see them. He laughed. "It's not necessary to do that," he said. "Anyone can come anytime, unannounced. But she says we lie, that we're hiding a horror chamber. We have national-level vets come visit—we have journalists and chefs. How am I going to trick these people?"

Henley assured me that the next morning, when I visited the farm, I'd be able to see what was behind every door. "And there is every possibility that, at some point, we will see a dead duck," he cautioned. The farm has a mortality rate of about 5 percent (from when they're hatched to when they reach 15 weeks, which is when they're slaughtered), so some animals do die along the way—as they do at every farm.

I'm no bird expert, so that night at the hotel, I made a list of the criteria that Dr. Temple Grandin had given me in a phone interview. Grandin is a universally respected animal-welfare expert whose opinions are esteemed by groups as radically far apart as McDonald's and PETA. Grandin cautioned that she hadn't been to a foie gras farm herself, but she would say that "ducks and geese will do a certain amount of gorging—that's natural." She explained that the birds prepare for migration by storing fat in their livers and beneath their skin. "An enlarged liver is not necessarily sick, but it's a matter of how far you push it. Are you overloading the birds' biology to the point where it falls apart? Is the duck so big and distorted that it can hardly walk?" She mentioned that birds do not have a gag reflex as humans do, but that the handlers must be careful not to hurt the birds' esophagi with the feeding tube.

Check for bright eyes, clean feathers, foot conditions, and the level of the smell of ammonia in the barn, she said. The birds won't be hungry, so they wouldn't flock to the feeders, but I should watch to see if they tolerate the feeding or try to get away. And if they do show aversion, I should try to figure out if it's because they don't want to be handled or don't want to be fed.

Both Grandin and Cheever agreed that it was important that I see the ducks in the later stages of force-feeding—if any ducks were sick, it would be these. But Cheever was convinced that the farm wouldn't show me those birds.

The next morning, I drove down the narrow road surrounded on either side with fields blanketed in snow and lit by a yellow moon about to set. The farm was at the end of the road, made up of long, low buildings constructed of lumber and corrugated steel. The structures looked out of date, having been built in the 1950s, but Izzy Yanay, the Israeli-born owner of the farm, said he's unable to put money into improvements until he's free from legal bills, the result of ongoing lawsuits from the Humane Society.

We met up with Henley and started to look around. The first thing I noticed was the lack of tiny cages. Hudson Valley raises its ducks in free-feeding barns until they're 12 weeks old. After that, the birds are moved to the force-feeding barns, but instead of being put into individual cages, they're housed in relatively spacious, open-topped group pens about the size of an office cubicle. In fact, none of the four foie gras farms in the United States currently uses the individual cages that have shown up in industrial farms in Canada and France. Hudson Valley's products are certified "cage-free."

Henley then took me to watch the oldest ducks get loaded into a rolling cart bound for the slaughter room. They waddled to the front of their pens and regarded us curiously. The birds that finished their feeding regime yesterday were the ones being loaded up for the big goodbye, while the others, who were on day 21 that day, were being fed.

The room is lined with four rows of pens that run lengthwise down the barn. There were 11 ducks in each four-by-six-foot pen, which are raised about a foot off the ground; wire mesh forms the floors of the pens, so that duck waste can fall through it into the channel beneath. The place smelled funky, and faintly of ammonia, but not overwhelmingly so. So far, the sights could not have been more different from the horrifying images I'd seen on the Internet.

Henley said that he'd been making some changes on the farm with the help of animal-welfare consultants, including Dr. Ericka Voogd (a colleague of Grandin's) and Dr. Tirath Sandhu, an avian scientist who is retired from the Cornell Veterinary School. One of the alterations could be found in the nurseries, our next stop.

This nursery held four-day-old chicks and smelled woodsy from the fluffy sawdust bedding covering the floor. The flock of yellow babies cheeped and toddled around the warm room. Until recently, the chicks lived on just one level of sawdust, but moisture from their drinking water would drip down into the bedding. At the prompting of the welfare consultants, the farm installed a wire-mesh ramp on one side of the room, leading up to a level wire-mesh floor, where the water nipples are now located. Moisture drips down through the mesh, and the bedding stays dry. Plus, said Henley, "it adds a level of complexity to their environment."

Henley then took us through a door into a similar room, which held nine-week-olds that looked nearly full-grown. The mass of feathers moved as one, scampering away from us as we entered the room. "You have to move slowly, or they'll stampede," Henley told us. We walked slowly out into the center of the room, and it was like parting the sea—but a sea of ducks.

Once the birds hit 12 weeks, they're moved from the growing areas—where they waddle around freely and have windows for natural light—to the group pens, where the 21-day force-feeding begins and the room is lit artificially. (It does seem like a step down in living arrangements.)

We headed back to the buildings where the feeding was taking place. A worker climbed into the pen with a stool and a wooden divider. (Each worker has a group of 320 to 350 ducks that he or she feeds every day during the 21-day regimen; workers whose ducks have low mortality rates and high-quality livers get bonuses.) A tube with a funnel at the top was strung from a wire above, and the worker slid it along into the pen she was about to work in. The birds clustered on one side of the pen, but didn't show nearly as much aversion to humans as the nine-week-olds we had just seen did—the older ducks seemed less alarmed by humans, which is hard to reconcile with if they were being tortured.

The woman sat on the stool, put the wooden divider in the middle of the pen, and reached for the first bird. She positioned the bird's body under her leg, eased the tube down the bird's throat, and poured a cupful of feed into the funnel above. A rotating auger spins in the funnel to make sure all of it goes down the pipe, but the food is delivered by gravity. The birds did not relish being grabbed, but the actual process with the tube didn't seem to bother them much. They sat with the tube down their throat for a very short period of time—about 10 to 15 seconds—without struggling or showing sign of distress. The whole process—pick up, position, feed, and release—took about 30 seconds. I watched the birds closely as they walked away from the feeding. Each waddled calmly away, looking unfazed: no breathing problems, no vomiting, and no trouble walking. Their feathers were fairly clean, and I didn't see any lesions on their feet or bodies.

But these ducks were only on their 12th day of force-feeding, so I asked to see the ducks on their 21st day again—this time, to pay more attention to the details of the feeding. We went back up to the area where we had started from. Some of the cages that were full when we saw them earlier were now half-empty, because some ducks actually go to slaughter earlier than the 22nd day. The feeder feels the base of each duck's esophagus (sometimes called a "pseudo-crop"), where feed is held that has yet to be digested. Birds that haven't digested the last feeding are marked with blue chalk and not fed. If they still haven't digested by the next feeding, they're not fed yet again and are marked with pink chalk and taken with the next batch to be slaughtered.

The birds on their 21st day of feeding appeared very much like the ones at 12 days, but were fatter and had dirtier feathers. The birds are bathed on the second and 10th days of feeding, but Henley said the farm was working with its animal-welfare consultants to find a way to keep the birds' feathers cleaner and thus prevent sores. These birds' reactions to the force-feeding were indistinguishable from those of the 12th-day birds. I looked for the signs that I'd been told would show me that the birds were desperately ill, but these birds, on their 21st day, were not having trouble walking or breathing, they weren't having seizures, and they weren't comatose.

I was at the farm for five hours, all told. I saw thousands of ducks, but not a drop of duck vomit. I didn't see an animal that was having a hard time breathing or walking, or a duck with a bloodied beak or blown-open esophagus. I did see one dead duck. And now I was going to see many more, as I went to the area where they are slaughtered.

Just before they are killed, the birds are hung upside-down (the most common poultry-slaughtering method) and hitched to a moving belt. A breast rub—installed at the suggestion of the animal-welfare consultants—stabilizes the upside-down birds and keeps them calm. Then they're knocked unconscious by a dip in electrified water, and, finally, a man in a yellow rubber suit uses a three-inch knife to make a deep cut in their necks. It all happens very quickly. A stainless-steel tub collects the crimson blood. It's not pleasant, but not as difficult to watch as you might think. And if I can't deal with it, I shouldn't be eating meat.

Soon afterward, I remembered to ask to see the esophagi removed from the slaughtered birds so I could check if they'd been damaged. I was taken past the workers slicing off the garnet breasts and legs and weighing cream-colored livers, and back into the slaughtering room. One worker was slicing off the feet, heads, and necks of the just-plucked ducks and placing those bits into a large garbage bin.

Rick Bishop, Hudson Valley's marketing director, plunged his bare hand into the bin and brought up a floppy, yellowish tube. It was stretchy, smooth, glossy, and thick. He turned part of it inside out, and I looked for abrasions, punctures, and bruises—anything that a layperson could identify as a sign that this esophagus had lived a tortured life. Nothing. I looked at several more esophagi plucked randomly from the bin, and all of them were pale pinkish-yellow and intact—no wounds, no blood, and no bruises or scrapes.

After the inspection, I sat down with Yanay, the owner, in his office. It didn't take much to set him off—animal activists are driving him nuts.

"You say I'm torturing ducks? Well, let's go and see. I invite the whole world to come and see," he said, sounding upset.

So where are the terrible images coming from? Some are from industrial farms in France, where individual cages are common. But Yanay blames bad farm management, not foie gras production itself. "Rats eating ducks?" he said. "You have a rat problem!"

One form of good management, Yanay added, is having each worker responsible for a particular group of ducks. They can track mortality and injuries for each worker—and workers who don't measure up are fired.

Yanay said that his farm is under a microscope, and his legal costs this month were $50,000. The Humane Society has hit the farm with several unsuccessful lawsuits. The latest one—which the New York Supreme Court dismissed, but is now in appeal—accuses the farm (and the New York State Department of Agriculture) of selling an adulterated food product, because, the plaintiffs say, the livers of force-fed ducks are diseased.

The notion that foie gras is diseased liver is often cited by opponents of the food. Cheever's e-mail to me described how, in the later stages of force-feeding, "air sac and lung volumes are compromised, and they begin to show metabolic illness from liver function impairment."

But Dr. Jaime Ruiz, director of Cornell's duck-research laboratory (and who was at pains to note that he did not support or oppose foie gras production) told me, "The farmers that I know here in New York and France handle the birds carefully, not feeding them above the physiological limits of the birds." He also said that he did not think that force-feeding, done correctly, would cause pain and that he does not consider an enlarged liver to be diseased.

I also called Dr. Sandhu, the retired avian scientist who consults with Hudson Valley Foie Gras on animal welfare. "I have been working with ducks all my life, for 30 years," he said. "[Foie gras] is not a disease. It has been shown by experiments that in birds with fatty livers, if you stop force-feeding, the liver comes back to a normal status." I asked him if the liver in foie gras birds was able to function. "Yes," he said. "It still functions normally and removes toxins. The bird is still standing; it is not sitting down. The weight of the liver is not causing the birds to collapse—they are walking and interacting with other birds."

Animal rights' groups often cite a 1998 report on foie gras from the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare. The 93-page report, though eventually concluding that "force-feeding, as currently practiced, is detrimental to the welfare of birds," is not exactly the slam dunk for animal rights' groups that I had been led to believe.

The report does not propose ending foie gras production, but instead puts forth recommendations for improving the way it's done. In fact, a part of the last section reads, "Since foie gras needs to be produced in order to satisfy the consumers' demand, it is important to produce it in conditions that are acceptable from the welfare viewpoint." The committee's suggestions include making sure that the liver size isn't causing distress to the animal, properly training all persons in charge of the birds, and banning the use of small, individual cages.

Meanwhile, the debate is not a theoretical problem for Knife + Fork, a small restaurant on the Lower East Side. Chef and owner Damien Brassel serves foie gras from the Hudson Valley farm, and he's convinced that the product is humane. "They go out of their way to show everyone exactly how it's done," he says, and suggests that the protesters go see it for themselves. Instead, the protesters have been outside his restaurant on the weekends, chanting things like, "Damien Brassel: How many geese have you tortured today?" The other night, Brassel went out to offer them some foie gras, which did not amuse them. "I take it personally," he says. "They're standing out there in leather jackets and Ugg boots." But the protesters' efforts are actually causing Brassel to sell more foie gras—customers have been requesting it, and he's added it to his tasting menu.

For now, protesters haven't been showing up outside Brassel's apartment or threatening his customers. But, as Mark Caro recounts in his book The Foie Gras Wars, due out in March, these tactics have recently been used by activists in Philadelphia. In one case, the general manager of a restaurant recalled that a protester screamed at a customer, "You should die of cancer!" and another restaurateur recounted that protesters would yell, "We know where you live, and we're gonna get you!" Sometimes, the protesters would actually show up in the neighborhood, or a child would come home saying that someone told her that her father murders ducks.

Why are activists so devoted to this issue? Most of the organizations against foie gras also advocate vegetarianism or veganism. If you generally oppose the manipulation of animals for food, you're going to oppose foie gras all the more, because the production does manipulate the animal more than usual. Manipulation does not necessarily equal abuse, though. But it's manipulation of a different sort that is at work in the videos I watched before my Hudson Valley visit. Those images are not representative of the reality at the nation's largest foie gras farm.

The fact that foie gras is delicious is nice, but it is also besides the point. If hanging puppies by their ears and cutting off their paws produced the most fantastic meat imaginable, I wouldn't eat it and neither would you. Just because we eat animals doesn't mean that we don't draw lines about the welfare of the animals we're going to eat. I support humanely raised (not penned) veal, and I buy cage-free eggs. I don't think it's OK to cut the fin off a shark and throw it back into the water. Personally, I would avoid foie gras from the producers in France and Canada that use individual cages. The fact that some industrial farms elsewhere are making foie gras in inhumane ways doesn't mean that all foie gras production is inhumane. You can buy humanely raised chicken, or you can buy chicken that's had a nasty, brutal life. The same goes for foie gras.

If I had seen with my own eyes that Hudson Valley produced foie gras by abusing ducks, this article would have turned out very differently. But that just wasn't the case.

~lee.

more reagan vs. fdr...

2009-02-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

[from salon...]

Obama's Reagan problem

Why did the president make the mistake of thinking he could work with the GOP? His mealy-mouthed support for the Gipper provides a clue.

By Gary Kamiya

Feb. 10, 2009 |

Barack Obama is constitutionally inclined to be a conciliator and a difference-splitter. As a legislator in Illinois, he was noted for his ability to get different parties to come together. In both his books, he appeals for America to go beyond old labels and ideological pigeonholes. And in his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, the speech that launched his national political career, he famously said, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America."

They're soaring words. Unfortunately, they're not true. And Obama (and America) has just paid a steep political price for his misplaced faith in bipartisanship.

The events of the last week proved that there is a liberal America and a conservative America. Singing "Kumbaya," Obama went hat in hand to the GOP to get their approval for his stimulus bill, and they spit in his face. Not a single House Republican supported it. And after frenzied negotiations that resulted in the Senate version of the bill being severely weakened, only three Republican senators said they would vote for it.

A reenergized GOP is comparing itself to the Taliban and crowing that it has rediscovered its "principles," which it mysteriously misplaced when a big-spending Republican was president. "We're so far ahead of where we thought we'd be at this time," exulted Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. "What will give us a shot in the arm going forward is that we are standing up on principle and just saying no," Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor said.

This is not a surprise. It was predictable that the radical ideologues who dominate today's GOP would reject any Democratic initiative that tries to undo the Reagan Revolution -- which is precisely what the structural aspects of the stimulus bill, which increase federal spending on education, healthcare, energy and aid to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, do. Why did Obama think that Republicans would sign off on a bill that implicitly rejects their free-market, tax-cutting, government-hating ideology?

Part of the answer is that Obama himself has defended aspects that very ideology. He has consistently praised Ronald Reagan.

Obama was widely, and legitimately, criticized on the left for saying during the campaign that Reagan "changed the direction of America" in a way that Bill Clinton did not. But that statement was gauzy and vague compared to what he wrote about Reagan in his second book, "The Audacity of Hope." "[T]he conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight -- that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie -- contained a good deal of truth," Obama wrote.

This is a classic piece of Obama rhetoric: generous, inclusive, slightly vague, staking out a both-sides-are-right position that appeals to the maximum number of voters. There's just one problem: It's totally false.

Just how did "the liberal welfare state" grow "complacent" under Democratic leadership? Which social entitlement programs would Obama single out as mismanaged or ill-conceived? How, specifically, did the alleged Democratic obsession with "slicing the economic pie" prevent them from "growing the pie?" And, above all, even if some entitlement programs were flawed, as no doubt some were, how could a liberal argue in good faith that those flaws justified Reagan's wholesale assault on the very idea of the safety net and on the progressive social agenda set in motion by FDR?

Obama does not say. And the reason he does not say, it seems clear, is that he doesn't really believe that "Reagan's central insight" was an insight at all, let alone that it "contained a good deal of truth."

No one argues that self-discipline, entrepreneurship, a vigorous free market, and the other virtues extolled by the Great Communicator are not good things. But Obama, like every liberal, surely believes that Reagan's adherence to trickle-down economics and other right-wing dogmas was disastrous (which Reagan himself implicitly acknowledged when, facing fiscal disaster, he raised taxes and greatly expanded the deficit and the size of the federal government) and that the Conservative Revolution he spearheaded sent America in the wrong direction. By vaguely claiming that Reagan's inspiring, morning-in-America message is synonymous with his deeply flawed presidency, Obama is obfuscating the crucial distinction between Reagan's ideals and his practices. He is scoring political points at the cost of intellectual coherence.

By praising Reagan, Obama was trying to present himself as a reassuring, all-American-like figure, a believer in hard work and personal responsibility, not just another orthodox liberal demanding more rights and entitlements. He was trying have it both ways: be a little bit of a free-market, anti-bureaucracy populist and a little bit of a big-government liberal. In other words, he was pandering to the swing voters, moderates and independents who decide elections.

Obama's all-things-to-all-people image worked well as a campaign tactic, but it is untenable when it comes to governance. You can't be a little bit liberal any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. At a certain point, you have to declare -- or decide -- who you are.

That moment has now arrived for Obama. By adopting a totally rejectionist stance, the GOP has made it impossible for Obama to reconcile his liberal vision of America with their conservative one. By, in effect, hitting him in the face and daring him to hit back, it has tested his mettle.

It might as well happen now. By drawing a line in the sand, claiming that the stimulus plan is the first step toward Communism or, as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford ludicrously said, "a savior-based economy," the Republicans have actually done Obama a favor, saved him from his worst compromising instincts. Obama's goal of moving America beyond its longstanding ideological differences is laudable, but it cannot be realized by pretending that those differences do not exist.

Obama is now taking his message to the American people. In Elkhart, Ind., hard hit by unemployment, he feistily argued that his bill will help working men and women and fired back sharply at his Republican critics. And in his first press conference Monday night, he dismissed those who oppose "the basic idea that government should intervene at all in this moment of crisis," said that Republicans who had presided over a doubling of the national debt had no standing to attack "wasteful government spending," and said, "What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that's part of what the election in November was all about."

That's a good start. But as the debate continues, it is critical that Obama make it clear what the real stakes in the battle over the stimulus package are. No doubt some version of the bill will pass. But that will only be a tactical victory, and it will not change the political equation in Washington. There is a larger battle that must be fought.

The Republicans have made it clear that they are Obama's mortal ideological enemies, and he must treat them as such. Respectfully, politely -- but as enemies nonetheless. That means not shying away from challenging conservatism's sacred cows -- the blind obeisance to the market, the dogmatic reliance on tax cuts, the reflexive hatred of government. It means making it unequivocally clear that government can be a force for social justice, that tax cuts for the wealthy are both discredited as economic policy and morally outrageous, and that the extreme income disparity in America is unacceptable and destructive of our economy. And it means playing political hardball. Obama must aggressively make the point that it was Republicans and Republican policies that got us into this mess and that the American people decisively rejected their failed policies and threadbare ideology.

Obama has begun doing that, but he needs to do it consistently. Instead of wandering around in some never-never land where the bloodthirsty lion lies down with the lamb, he needs to make it clear that the lion is a lion. In his press conference, Obama said he remains "an eternal optimist" about the possibility of working constructively with the GOP. If that civil rhetoric is merely tactical, a velvet glove covering the iron fist, it's unobjectionable. But if Obama truly believes he can find common philosophical ground with Republicans, and acts on that belief, he's dooming his presidency to mediocrity. He can cloak his arguments in the soothing language of bipartisanship, but the reality is that he needs to delegitimize the contemporary GOP in the eyes of the American people, make them see that it is an extreme party that has learned absolutely nothing from its catastrophic mistakes and has nothing to offer except obstructionism.

After the last eight years, that shouldn't be very hard to do.

Democrats have long been afraid of openly challenging the tenets of conservatism. There's some reason for this fear. There are deep conservative threads that run through the country: Americans are more mistrustful of government, more supportive of the free market, and more dubious about the welfare state than citizens of any other Western country. The word "liberal" has become tainted. And Reagan is deemed too sacrosanct to challenge.

But after the disastrous Bush years, Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of avoiding the confrontation with the American right and its toxic legacy -- or trying to gloss it over with pretty words, as Obama did with Reagan. And there will never be a better time to challenge the monster in the right-wing cave. It is talking tough now, but it is weakened and confused, and it has just been roundly rejected by the American people. Americans are in a crisis, and they are prepared to take a fresh look at old dogmas. As Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas pointed out in an insightful Newsweek article titled "We Are All Socialists Now," Americans suffer from cognitive dissonance about big government: They distrust it and say they don't want it, but want the things that only it can deliver. And with the great god of free market capitalism now revealed to have feet of clay to everyone who has (or had) a 401K, the time is ripe for an articulate and non-threatening liberal to explain to Americans why the federal government has a vital role to play and does not have to be the enemy of individual initiative.

His administration is not even a month old, but this is a defining moment for Obama. If he has the courage to challenge his foes, using his gifts as a communicator to rally the American people behind a generous and liberal vision of the future, he has the chance to fatally weaken the right wing. If he does not, he will give his enemies a reprieve and condemn his presidency to endless, destructive "compromises" with rigid ideologues who will never admit that their ideas have failed.

Obama is not a fighter by nature. And the last thing America needs is another eruption of false machismo in the White House. But it's time for him to say to the Republicans, "Bring it on

~lee.

A life of family strain, inequality and insecurity has become accepted as inevitable. This was Ronald Reagan's Trojan horse, disguised as optimism...

2009-02-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

[from salon...]

The new Great Communicator ... isn't

Obama is stumbling in the stimulus debate -- and public support is dropping -- because for 30 years Republicans have lied about the role of government. Now he's got to tell the truth.

By Joan Walsh

Feb. 04, 2009 |

Tuesday's Tom Daschle news stepped all over President Obama's stimulus sales campaign. Likewise, it kept me from writing about Robert Reich's excellent Salon piece on the larger issues at stake in the stimulus battle, but I want to take it up today.

Reich said something Democrats almost never say: The so-called fundamentals of our economy didn't start weakening in 2007 or 2008 with the housing and credit crisis; they haven't been strong for most American workers since wages began stagnating in the 1970s.

I'm going to quote Reich in a major way in a minute. But I'm writing because I'm concerned about how Obama is and isn't selling his crucial stimulus/recovery bill. I'm wondering about what he'd say about it in an FDR-style "fireside chat." On YouTube, or wherever. Even though I'm an Obama admirer, and also, I'm paid to know these things, I'm not sure I do know how he'd make the case for why this bill will solve our economy's problems, and why it must pass. And soon, because new poll numbers now show that public support for it is already dropping fast. A Rasmussen poll says 43 percent oppose it, and 37 support it, an 8-point slide in two weeks. Nate Silver thinks that poll overstates the bill's troubles. "There is some evidence -- the trendline in the Rasmussen poll -- that he stimulus has become less popular. There is no evidence, on the other hand, that the stimulus has become unpopular; on the contrary, the preponderance of polling evidence suggests it remains a course of action that most of the public likes." Still, the Washington Post reported today that Senate Democrats don't think they have the votes to pass it right now.

Obama is the Democrats' Great Communicator, our Ronald Reagan. It's fitting that his highest priority will be reversing the tax and spending priorities Reagan enshrined as a new American compact almost 30 years ago, and reviving the notion of government as an engine of capitalist growth -- not merely the safety net provider, but the catalyst for organizing our public resources around what makes the economy strong. We've been arguing at the margins during these last two years of pain: Government should regulate more, or less. Tax rates should be higher, or lower. But there's a dangerous civic illiteracy in our country about what the larger role of government in a modern economy is, or should be, and I don't think Obama will ultimately prevail if he doesn't start to take it on.

Obama is the most remarkable Democratic communicator of my lifetime, I think, and even he's not rising to the task, yet. He needs to lay out his priorities, clearly; he needs to simplify his pitch, yet he also needs to add some depth to his and our understanding of how we got here. This economic crisis is not just about bad mortgages and/or the housing bubble bursting, and it won't be solved by reinflating that bubble, the Republicans' latest dumb idea. These problems have been building since at least the 1970s. Here's how Reich laid it out on Salon:

The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970s, when median U.S. incomes began to stall. Because wages got hit then by the double-whammy of global competition and new technologies, the typical American family was able to maintain its living standard only if women went into the workforce in larger numbers, and later, only if everyone worked longer hours.

When even these coping mechanisms were exhausted, families went into debt -- a strategy that was viable as long as home values continued to rise. But when the housing bubble burst, families were no longer able to easily refinance and take out home-equity loans. The result: Americans no longer have the money to keep consuming. When you consider that consumers make up 70 percent of the economy, the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.

What happened to the money? According to researchers Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent. But the rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do -- after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. That's why the concentration of income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send the economy into a tailspin. (It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income.)

Now, honestly, I'm not sure how President Obama makes this point, roughly hourly, for the next four (and I hope eight) years. But this point has to be made, as often as possible, by anyone with an audience. We've had a deliberate shift of resources from middle- and working-class Americans and the poor, to the very rich, supported by our tax codes, twisted political values and the "winner-take-all" ethic that's prevailed at the highest levels of business and government for the last 30 years. Now, unbelievably, Republicans are saying we need even more tax cuts. (What part of tax-cutter George W. Bush's economic catastrophe, and his 22 percent approval rating, do they not understand?) They also back measures to reinflate the housing bubble that let Americans ignore their stagnating wages, as long as they worked more hours as a family and could also use their homes as an ATM. Their plans to reinflate the housing bubble seem as delusional, frankly, as their backing tax cuts, and even more irresponsible. Tax cuts won't work, but reinflating the housing bubble might work -- to encourage more consumption and less savings, and roll this problem a few more years down the road.

Democrats know the Republicans are wrong. Little children know they're wrong. Cats and dogs know they're wrong. But somehow this week, unbelievably, Obama and the Democrats seem to be losing the spin war. There are the worrying poll numbers. And there is the Washington Post report that Senate Democrats don't have the votes to pass a stimulus bill yet, at least not with the 60 votes that would rule out a filibuster. In this economic crisis, with 2.6 million jobs lost last year and thousands more lost in every news cycle, what does it take to create the urgency and responsibility to get this done?

I'd like everyone in charge of selling the stimulus to take a deep breath, and then, in an extended sound bite, articulate the long view (I know, I ask a lot). Along with Reich, Jeff Madrick goes into all the larger issues in greater detail in his excellent book "The Case for Big Government," and winds up in the same place (even though, remarkably, the book was written before the current economic collapse and attendant debate over what the stimulus should do). I hope Obama and his team are reading Madrick and Reich. Because they're really just talking common sense: Public spending priorities need to catch up to 21st-century economic life. The long and lamentable Republican revolution of 1980 through 2008 aimed, and partly succeeded, in sending us back to the 19th century -- and we are all suffering for it. We will continue to suffer unless Democrats grab the political momentum voters gave them in November.

Of course, the 19th century wasn't all bad, but in our current political environment, we've forgotten what was good: Eventually government (thanks to political, religious and labor agitation) came to see its role as providing K-12 education, building roads, canals, bridges and railroads (after private sector efforts faltered), and the slow budding of certain health and safety regulations. In the 20th century, that public mandate expanded into Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other safety net programs, thanks to the New Deal and the Great Society. Today, profound economic change likewise requires new government initiatives, but they are many years overdue, for a lot of depressing political and economic reasons. The years since the early 1970s have been hard for middle- and low-income workers. Real wages became stagnant -- the average weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers actually fell between 1973 and 2005. The late '60s and early '70s also marked the exodus of manufacturing jobs in the central cities, which William Julius Wilson and others persuasively argue played a huge role in creating the so-called underclass in many once-vital African-American neighborhoods.

Madrick lays out a few new-economy political priorities; you may have more, add them in comments:

Why, when post-secondary education is essential in this economy, are most families on their own when it comes to paying for college? Secondary education is awesome, isn't it? Can you imagine this country without it? But isn't it time to think beyond that? Why isn't K-16 or so an American entitlement?

A chart published a year ago by Moody's Economy.com shows that the types of measures in the Democrats' stimulus plan actually put money into the economy, fast. For example, according to Economy.com's model, every dollar lost to the Treasury from increased infrastructure spending would add $1.59 to the gross domestic product in a year. Every dollar lost to a cut in the corporate tax rate would add 30 cents to the GDP in a year.

And why, when most women work, is there so little support for childcare, family leave and other family friendly social policies?

Also: Why, when the cost of health insurance is tacking thousands of dollars onto the cost of every American-made car, and threatening to capsize many small businesses, is there so little serious progress on healthcare and insurance reform in our public realm? Where are the capitalist visionaries of yesteryear, trying to shape public spending by driving it toward what businesses need to thrive?

Oh, and climate change: If that continues, we're all screwed, college grads and high school dropouts, moms, dads, auto execs, small-business owners, capitalist pigs and visionaries alike. But we've gotten no real movement on climate change these last eight years (though I'm grateful to Obama for deferring to my GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at least a little bit on this one). Again: why?

The Democrats' stimulus plan has funding to deal with all of those enormous unmet needs (although probably not enough). The bigger question is, why isn't the country clamoring for support for such capitalism-bolstering programs, especially at this time of economic crisis and political optimism ushered in by the election of Obama, which was, paradoxically, motivated by enormous voter pessimism about that same crisis?

The answer is not merely that American workers and voters and unions and Democrats mysteriously stopped agitating for progressive change in the 1960s (although many did, and the weakness of unions is part of the story, but it's as much an effect as a cause of these political and economic sea-changes). The fact is, there was a massive organized political campaign against the egalitarian and economy-growing reforms of the 1930s and the 1960s, one that ran from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to John McCain, a very well-run and well-funded and sadly effective backlash. And it's one that nobody wants to talk about, in our convivial, bipartisan, cable-news-dominated, partisan-blog-loving, newspaper-shrinking, amnesia-promoting political and media-freakshow entertainment economy.

But we have to.

It's clear from the stimulus debate that some conservatives never stopped fighting the New Deal, as empty as their arguments were then and now. Andrew Leonard is brilliant, in my opinion, but he's only one guy, and he alone takes down multiple well-funded think tanks dedicated to anti-New Deal idiocy. The stupid, it burns, but the stupid is relentless.

Then there's the whole legacy of the Great Society. A lot of the opposition to government spending suddenly, opportunistically became (overtly or covertly) racial in the 1960s and '70s, as the social and political and economic change inspired by the civil rights movement intersected with new social programs, some of them awesome, a few of them wasteful, all of them only partly effective. The bottom line for Republicans became: The government is helping those other people with your tax dollars, they're not helping you. And some Democrats agreed.

Now, many if not most of us need help from our own tax dollars, and the Democrats seem ill-equipped to make the arguments to make that happen, despite Obama's overwhelming win in November. This really makes no political sense to me.

Here's how I think Obama should sell the stimulus. Long version here, short version below.

First, he should make it unapologetically clear that we are putting money in the hands of people who will spend it, fast, when no one else is spending: Working-class and low-income people, the employed and the recently unemployed. Food stamps, extended unemployment insurance, help with health insurance, the earned income tax credit, payroll tax relief. (Stunningly, Ronald Reagan lowered taxes on the rich but raised payroll taxes, an unforgivably regressive wealth transfer.) All those measures get money in the hands of people who can't afford to hoard it, and it goes back into the economy immediately. Democrats think such spending is justified by the principles of fairness and equity, but whatever your political beliefs, you should know that these priorities mean that money will be spent in the real world quickly, and that's what the economy needs.

Almost as quickly, we are funding so-called shovel-ready infrastructure programs, which will get money into the economy ASAP, funding jobs while also doing the things American business and government needs to catch up with the rest of the world. We can't afford more levies breaking in New Orleans or bridges collapsing in Minneapolis -- or anywhere else.

We're also putting money into not-quite shovel-ready but crucial programs, especially mass transit that links our suburbs and exurbs with our central cities, and creates opportunity for everyone, and programs that reduce climate change and move us to a future driven by green jobs and industry.

Finally, we are belatedly making down payments on our 21st-century economy that, sadly, nobody was wise enough to make in the last century. Head Start and education funding, college programs, healthcare reform, green job creation, energy efficiency and climate change spending: We can't catch up with the rest of the world if we don't spend on those things, belatedly, right now. It's not a matter of if, it's when, and I believe the time is now. That's what you elected me to do. These programs will stimulate the kind of recovery that will make sure our children don't face the same kind of crisis in another generation.

Obama can no doubt improve on my language. He can probably improve the taxonomy of spending. He may even have different priorities. The point is, he has to lay them out.

He made a start today. Here's what he said when introducing limits on executive compensation for firms getting TARP money:

That’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that is before Congress today. With it, we can save or create more than three million jobs, doing things that will strengthen our country for generations to come. It is not merely a prescription for short-term spending – it’s a strategy for long-term economic growth in areas like renewable energy, health care, and education.

Now, in the past few days I’ve heard criticisms of this plan that echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject that theory, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. So I urge members of Congress to act without delay. No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger. But let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential. Let’s show people all over our country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task.

It's better, but it's not enough. He needs bigger and simpler themes: Put money in the hands of those who need it most -- and will spend it fastest. Create jobs and rebuild infrastructure so we see no more levees fail, bridges collapse and school buildings crumble. Invest in new, future-facing job-creating projects like new transit and green industry. Finally, do what our brave ancestors did, and make government again the engine of economic development, by providing the support 21st century employers and workers require: from Head Start and early education programs through college funding; new health insurance programs; lifetime worker retraining, investments in broadband infrastructure and green technologies.

It could be inspiring; it's certainly necessary. If Obama fights on big themes of rights and responsibilities and how we get through this crisis together, he wins. If he lets the debate remain on the level of "Why is there contraception funding in the bill? How is furniture for the Department of Homeland Security stimulative? We've just got to reinflate the housing bubble!" he loses, and we lose. It shouldn't be this hard.

Here's how Madrick summed up the Reagan revolution. It's depressing: "A life of family strain, inequality and insecurity has become accepted as inevitable. It is even thought to be a strength of America. This was Ronald Reagan's Trojan horse, disguised as optimism." But now it's Morning in America, for the rest of us. Obama needs to take his sales pitch to a new level. People want to believe he can make a difference, but time's a wasting.

~lee.

there's a good reason for this, i promise...

2009-02-03T18:39:00.001-08:00

hey there. here are some pictures of the guys i made the record with.

james caran:

cary henderson:

patrick pfeiffer:

~lee.

i just can't help myself...

2009-02-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

okay so i know we're in the obama era blah blah blah but this one was just too good. from an email my friend john sent me last week:

Ice cream flavors to honor George W. Bush

Ben & Jerry created "Yes Pecan!" ice cream flavor this month, for Obama and Common Cause.

For George W. they created "_________".

Here are some of my favorite responses:

- Grape Depression
- Abu Grape
- Cluster Fudge
- Nut'n Accomplished
- Iraqi Road
- Chock 'n Awe
- WireTapioca
- Impeach Cobbler
- Guantanmallow
- imPeachmint
- Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker... Swirl
- Heck of a Job, Brownie!
- Neocon Politan
- RockyRoad to Fascism
- The Reese's-cession
- Cookie D'oh!
- Anchovy Fuckup Surprise
- The Housing Crunch
- Nougalar Proliferation
- Death by Chocolate... and Torture
- Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
- Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder
- "You're Shitting In My Mouth And Calling It A" Sundae
- Credit Crunch
- Mission Pecanplished
- Country Pumpkin
- Chunky Monkey in Chief
- George Bush Doesn't Care About Dark Chocolate
- WMDelicious
- Chocolate Chimp
- Sundae Bloody Sundae
- Caramel Preemptive Stripe
- I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of thousands...with nuts

~lee.

i want to run...

2009-02-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

don't drink & drive out there today, everybody. happy superbowl.

~lee.

tracks in progress...

2009-01-30T14:51:00.000-08:00

please click on the "tracks in progress" title to download the song... note that this is not a finished product. enjoy.

song for amanda.

i watched you look away...
from the question that i asked you and the answer you gave.
you had this ashen look on your face...
like you'd just been refused your final stay.

what happened to not making the same mistakes?
i guess from lessons you didn't learn.
what happened to the future that you promised me?
what happened to the future we deserved?

this shirt feels like it's on fire.
these green walls are closing in.
now i just sit here like the fool i am,
and think about the fool that i've been.

all the words i heard you say sounded underwater...
bought myself a drink at the bar and toasted to fate.
the city lights seemed to spike their fair share of blame...
but i didn't think twice, i just turned and walked away.

this shirt feels like it's on fire.
these green walls are closing in.
now i just sit here like the fool i am,
and think about the fool that i've been.

~lee.

even a national tragedy cannot be allowed to define -- and distort -- a nation forever...

2009-01-27T12:47:00.000-08:00

[from salon...]

Obama's call to arms

By rejecting Bush's torture tactics, the new president is urging Americans to reclaim their principles -- and their courage.

By Gary Kamiya

Jan. 27, 2009 |

The sins of the George W. Bush era were many. It was a time of shrill ideology, naked greed and staggering incompetence. But perhaps its most toxic legacy has passed almost unnoticed: cowardice.

Just how afraid Bush was, and how deeply his fear distorted our national values, only truly became clear on Thursday, Jan. 22. On that memorable day, President Obama signed four executive orders ending the CIA's use of secret overseas prisons, directing that Guantánamo be closed within a year, halting military commission proceedings against detainees held there, and, most important, forbidding the use of torture in interrogations. "The U.S. intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terror but in a manner consistent with our values and ideals," Obama said.

By signing those four executive orders, Obama emphatically rejected Bush's warped vision of America, and announced the return of the confident, principled country we all believed in, and too cavalierly took for granted. With a few strokes of the pen, he began to erase the ugly ethos that dishonored us for eight years, and called upon us to stand for a braver, better America. An America that will not abandon its moral principles at the first setback. An America that knows its real power lies not in its mighty army but in its mightier ideals.

The miasma of repressed fear that has hung over America for so long will not dissipate overnight. Right-wing pundits are shrieking that we must keep torturing to keep America safe, and claiming that if Guantánamo detainees are moved into ordinary prisons, America's cities will be the targets of terrorist attacks. These boogeymen have been effective for years, and they will not instantly disappear. But since Obama's repudiation of Bush's hide-under-the-bed-and-shoot ethos, the country already feels more like the home of the brave and less like a land of furtive torturers.

When you think of the Bush presidency, fear isn't the first thing that comes to mind. The cowboy swagger, the macho "bring it on" boasts, the loud declarations of a "war on terror," the endless statements that we were going to fight until final victory -- the president and his administration came across like John Wayne, not Walter Mitty. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld carried the Biggus Dickus role to extremes, turning press conferences into a testosterone-spraying contest, treating anyone who dared to question his brilliant Iraq tactics, his fleet of unarmored Humvees or his pie-in-the-sky ideas about a tiny new high-tech army like a 98-pound weakling. And the approach worked like a charm: Congressional Democrats and the mainstream media, fearful of being painted as "weak on national security," waggled their derrieres in the air like lower-status baboons deferring to a group of alpha males.

But behind their posturing, Bush, his manly-men cronies and their right-wing cheering section were trembling weenies who fled their posts at the first shot. In a perfect world, they would not only be dragged before the International Criminal Court for their crimes, but suffer public branding for desertion, their bars ripped off and their sabers broken as in the opening scene in the old Chuck Connors TV show "Branded."

Bush allowed a tiny band of fanatics, led by a turbaned bozo hiding in a cave, to so terrify him that he abandoned his sworn duty to preserve, protect and defend the United States and what it stands for. Like a nervous, inexperienced general who panics at an enemy feint and pours troops from both wings into the skirmish, exposing his army's flanks, Bush completely lost sight of both strategy and tactics. Unmanned by fear, he treated a small group of Salafi jihadists who managed to get in a lucky strike as if they were a monstrous, apocalyptic entity from an evil galaxy beyond space and time, an army of Satanists endowed with inhuman powers. Then, having created this phantasmagorical enemy out of some right-wing biblical sci-fi novel, he proceeded to fight it by trashing America's most cherished traditions, embracing torture and Big Brother tactics. His hysterical reaction not only increased global hatred against the U.S. and bred many more terrorists than he killed, it overburdened and severely weakened our military and allowed the real enemy to slip away.

If Bush was a student at a military college, he'd have flunked out.

The callow Bush fell into bin Laden's trap. As its name implies, terrorism is intended to terrify. Its strategic motivation, insofar as it has one, is to make those who are terrified react in irrational, self-defeating ways. The 9/11 attacks were not only terrifying, their terror was hideously spectacular. It is understandable that many Americans were so terrified and traumatized by the 9/11 attacks that they were willing to do anything, abandon any principle, to be safe. But a general, unlike a private, must be coldblooded, able to size up the battlefield situation dispassionately and move his pieces around the board like a chess player. It was Bush's responsibility to rationally evaluate the threat posed by al-Qaida and take the appropriate measures to address it. Instead, he lost his poise, declared an impossible, unwinnable and counterproductive "war on terror," gratuitously invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and ordered U.S. military and intelligence personnel to begin using Gestapo tactics.

Bush called it a "war on terror." But it was really a war of terror -- his terror.

Bush's cowardice, masquerading as he-man toughness, led him to do unforgivable things. The most glaring example is torture. In what future historians will surely regard as one of the darkest moments in American history, Bush and his cronies approved this ugliest of human behaviors -- and, appallingly, much of the country went blandly along with it.

Torture is what the Gestapo did. It is what Pol Pot did. It is what the Argentine junta did. It is not what America or any civilized nation should do. And it doesn't matter if torture might on some occasion save lives. It crosses a line that cannot be crossed.

Torturing exposes American troops to torture, degrades America's reputation and in the long run undermines our ability to win an ideological war. But the ultimate reason not to torture must go beyond instrumental logic: It must be moral. It is one of the most hallowed principles of law that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be punished. A related moral principle applies to torture: Even if torture saves lives, it must never be used, simply because it is wrong. The devout Bush apparently never pondered this line from Scripture: "What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?"

The same thing applies to due process and the rule of law. Closing Guantánamo and giving those indefinitely detained as "enemy combatants" real, fair trials, with rules of evidence and witnesses, will in the long run enhance our security, not weaken it. It was the U.S. judicial system, not a military tribunal, that convicted the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Still, there is the possibility that some guilty men may go free, and some of them could be dangerous. That is a heavy price to pay for principle. But a country that believes that its ideals are more than words on a piece of paper must be prepared to pay that price.

It is appalling how easily Bush was able to convince many Americans that humanity's deepest ethical principles, the ones embraced by every world religion, were less important than a myth of total security. Alas, when fear is enshrined as national policy, it is contagious.

We have been living with fear for far too long: fear of terrorism, fear of the unknown, fear of speaking out, fear of ourselves. And fear, because it is reality-averse, begets magical thinking. Under Bush we became a nation both of cowards and of delusional fantasists. It makes sense that the same nation that swallowed Bush's fear-driven war on Iraq also believed that the market would just keep soaring until every American was rich. The dream of perfect security and instant wealth are two faces of the same debased coin.

Fear is kept alive by powerful taboos. To demand that we stop allowing our lives to be distorted by fear, or to question any of Bush's overwrought policies, was supposedly to profane the bloodshed that terrible day the towers fell. But even a national tragedy cannot be allowed to define -- and distort -- a nation forever.

Bush confronted evil with evil. He tortured, lied and flouted the law. By so doing, he deserted posts more vital than any front-line position: He abandoned the Constitution, he fled from the moral law. And we all, collectively, let him do it.

Now America has a wiser leader, one who has the self-confidence not to strut about like a two-bit bully. The apostles of fear and anger -- masquerading as being "tough on national security" -- are still entrenched and powerful. But at least the battle is joined, and those of us who for so long were derided as cowards, as appeasers, as cut-and-runners, make up a powerful army of our own. And on Thursday, we heard four trumpet blasts sounding a call to arms.

~lee.

woolgathering...

"Some differences cannot be split. Either we are locked in an endless, self-defeating war on terror or we are not."

In the shadow of Cheney

greenwald does it again...

Hailing the leader as a War President and the powers that go with it

interesting little thing...

Radio rage

re: torture...

What We Know So Far: A Torture Timeline (Updated)

by DanK Is Back

Thu Apr 23, 2009 at 09:38:04 PM PDT

i have found the best thing that the internet has ever produced...

it is really fucking hot in my house...

The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

this is my easter present to everyone...

America is not a Christian nation

great review of one of the best albums ever...

Album Review

Pearl Jam Ten: Deluxe Edition

for better or worse i am becoming kind of obsessed with mr. taibbi...

Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He'd Give

W. comes clean - on his dad, Condi's farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy

this is one of the single greatest things i've ever read...

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

"the overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? the overarching question is: why has there been so little?"

The virtues of public anger and the need for more

"cheney and his like are the evil people... we are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people such as he."

jon stewart deserves a pulitzer prize, i think...

There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer

"The story of Ayn Rand is strangely revealing about the world - and the America that is slipping away..."

The Last Person On Earth To Turn To Now Is Ayn Rand

my life in twenty- five records...

accountability now...

'Accountability Now': Bloggers And Progressive Groups Plan To Challenge Elected Dems

couldn't agree with this more...

No Lunch Left Behind

regarding foie gras...

Is Foie Gras Torture?

By Sarah DiGregorio

more reagan vs. fdr...

Obama's Reagan problem

A life of family strain, inequality and insecurity has become accepted as inevitable. This was Ronald Reagan's Trojan horse, disguised as optimism...

The new Great Communicator ... isn't

there's a good reason for this, i promise...

i just can't help myself...

i want to run...

tracks in progress...

even a national tragedy cannot be allowed to define -- and distort -- a nation forever...

Obama's call to arms

Pearl Jam
Ten: Deluxe Edition