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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Barney Frank has become something of a darling on the left because of his feistiness, which heaven knows is in short supply among Democratic politicians. That quality seems to work best for someone who will go down with the ship on principle, all other considerations be damned; someone like Dennis Kucinich, who voted against the House health care bill under just that circumstance. (Phoenix Woman brilliantly articulated the hazards of this outlook.*) It does not work so well with someone who appears to be at least half in the pocket of the interests he ostensibly oversees.

His interview with Ed Schultz earlier this week gave a clear illustration of why. Schultz pushed on a couple of key points: Last year's bailout came with no strings attached, and as a result the major players have gone back to the same reckless behavior. Frank turned prickly, which is what feisty looks like when you don't like it, and almost immediately said "don't condescend to me" when Schultz was obviously doing no such thing. He proceeded to condescend to Schultz throughout the interview; "the point I made to you several times" and "What's the matter with you?" stand out. There was also this:

SCHULTZ: Congressman, why can't you just admit that this was a serious misstep on the part of the Congress? You forked out billions of dollars to save the economy, I get all that, to get the structure back going again. But you didn't ask them questions about how this...

FRANK: No, Ed. You're wrong.

SCHULTZ: Oh, tell me I'm wrong.

FRANK: You're wrong. And I'd like to be able to explain it.

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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Issues of financial reform and regulation can be intimidating to laymen (this layman anyway) because of its insanely complex nature. It is easy to imagine the system as a big Jenga tower, and moving one piece might cause the whole thing to come crashing down. No one wants to be seen as inadvertently - but earnestly! - advocating for a ruinous policy. Of course, that means the opposite extreme is then in play: Turning into Hamlet and endlessly agonizing over what to do at the expense of actually doing something. Not to mention the fact that, not to put too fine a point on it, wide swaths of our leadership has for years now been deliberately advocating ruinous policies both at home and abroad. That should certainly make those of us in the unwashed masses comfortable with forcefully advocating what seems reasonable based on available data. It's not as though we could screw it up any worse.

Still, it would be nice to have a rule of thumb, compass point or guiding principle to go by. Having been a reasonably close observer of the meltdown and its aftermath, here is one I have come up with: It is necessary (but not sufficient) that any proposal be strenuously opposed by Goldman Sachs (GS). In a largely protected industry Goldman appears to be the closest thing to untouchable as we have. It is in Matt Taibbi's already-legendary description "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." It has installed a revolving door between the highest levels of the government and its board room, enjoys privileged lines of communication with the Treasury secretary exceeding even that of our closest allies, was happily positioned as a key competitor died, then days later benefited as a key debtor was drenched in cash (Yves Smith called it a "massive backdoor subsidy to the likes of Goldman"), and as it happens was the second largest contributor to the president in the 2008 election cycle. More so than any other player in financial services, GS always seems to be nearby when bad things happen.

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I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.
- Will Rogers

Frustration with Democratic leadership seemed to boil over in the last week or so. It began (as far as I can tell) with John Aravosis' withering criticism of the president over his speech last weekend at a Human Rights Campaign event. He wrote of "concerns about President Obama's inaction, and backtracking" on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy towards gays. The criticism led to backlash (here is a good example) and tensions have been high all around since. In a way Obama is not the right target, and some have acknowledged that even as they urge him to act. Vermont Law School Associate Professor of Law Jackie Gardina advocates his taking action on DADT, but acknowledges all he can change is the implementation. Overturning it can only be done by Congress. The same is true for DOMA. While it may be more appealing to focus all criticism on a single target, the fact is that these changes will only be durable when the legislature acts. The president is obviously not a passive figure in all this - he can urge Congress to act, give moral support to the effort through his rhetoric (something that has curiously been treated as largely irrelevant on this issue) and otherwise encourage action on these issues, but in the end the action is at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Masthead
The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:
Aeryl, BDBlue and danps.

Contents

1. Introduction (danps)
2. Review: Fat Princess (danps)

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Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
- George Bernard Shaw

Trolling through some recent history I found this from hipparchia from back in March. Jason Rosenbaum:

The argument that single-payer health care would be more efficient is a straw man. Both health care reform plans would increase efficiencies and save a great deal of money. But only one can get 60 votes in the Senate.

The HCAN strategy all along has been to calculate based on some unknown formula what is politically feasible at the moment (curiously, without seeming to take into account the effect that energetic activism can have on feasibility) and direct all its energy towards that goal. It's a reasonable and legitimate plan, I wish them success on it, and for reform advocates generally (including single payer) their success is all our success. I still don't like it, though.

First, it's asymmetrical. Do you think AHIP is so finely calibrating its strategy? Hell no. They're trying to burn the motherfucker clear to the ground. We need to be the equal and opposite reaction by repeatedly and loudly demanding our entire wish list. Second, it's not our job to think about, or even care, if the perfect is being the enemy of the good. That's for politicians to consider, not activists. Our job is to ceaseless agitate for the best policy. Our elected representatives can worry about the perfect, the good, the realistic and the rest of the sausage-making process.

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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

On Monday I sent the following email to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Colorado:

The recent letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] opposing a House health care plan on the grounds that its prohibition of abortion funding was a "legal fiction" raised a question to me. I first learned of you because of your statement that voting for John Kerry in 2004 was cooperating in evil due to his position on abortion, so I know how seriously you take the issue. My question is, has the American church, the Conference or any other official Catholic body or agency taken a position on Catholics' purchasing insurance from companies that provide abortion services? All of the major ones - Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, United Healthcare and so on - provide abortion services in their policies. Doesn't anyone who pays premiums to these insurers help to fund abortion, and wouldn't that also amount to cooperating in evil?

It seems the Catholic Church has focused all of its energy and activism on government's role but left the private sector off scot-free. I am not aware of any visibility on this from the church, and that appears to be a glaring omission. Has it been addressed, and if so has it been addressed as forcefully? On the face of it, it seems to me that anything contributing to abortions, public or private, would be equally objectionable.

Thanks in advance for any time and attention you are able to provide.

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Washington's view on ethics seems to be schizophrenic. Lawbreaking that is done for immediate personal gratification - primarily sexual or financial - is lavished with attention. Political opponents call for investigations and resignations, news outlets provide saturation coverage, vehement denunciations are issued and defenses raised, and generally speaking a high old time is had by all. Since Republicans like to appeal to voters as the party of values and morality there is usually a credible charge of hypocrisy coming from the left when it's a GOP perpetrator. But the capitol is entirely unequipped to grapple with illegality that happens for less obvious reasons, and elites tend to bend over backwards to rationalize it when they are forced to confront it.

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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

I started reading A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman recently and was struck by this from page 43:

Philip bullied the first Avignon Pope, Clement V, into authorizing the trials of the Templars, and with this authority put them to atrocious tortures to extract confessions. Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture. The Templars, many of them old men, were racked, thumbscrewed, starved, hung with weights until joints were dislocated, had teeth and fingernails pulled one by one, bones broken by the wedge, feet held over flames, always with pauses in between and the "question" put again each day until confession was wrung out or the victim died. Thirty-six died under the treatment; some committed suicide. Broken by torture, the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and 122 others confessed to spitting on the cross or some other variation of crime put into their mouths by the Inquisitors. "And he would have confessed that he had slain God Himself if they had asked him that," acknowledged a chronicler.

How does America's treatment of detainees look next to that?

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All presidents are unpopular with a good part of the electorate, but there seems to be little skepticism towards the office itself. There is plenty of distrust and even outright revulsion towards particular presidents based on, for instance, whether one is more outraged by extramarital sex - by a political opponent, not by an ally - or war crimes. (Ironically, Republicans' approach with Mark Sanford has been to censure and move on; their refusal to use precisely that remedy with president Clinton was key in launching the first highly visible netroots site.) I am not even referring to the lunacy now coming into full bloom in some quarters. All those examples are about who a particular president is or what he has done. I am referring more to what a president ought to be able to do, which has trended almost exclusively towards greater deference and larger grants of authority in the last few years.

It is possible to argue, as Dana Nelson details in her book Bad For Democracy, that the presidency has been slowly but steadily aggrandizing since 1832 when Andrew Jackson "detoured from his predecessors who viewed the president as a mere executive by expanding his power when a clear mandate was expressed to him from 'the people.'" The president has increasingly come to be central to American political life and even viewed as the personification of the country. For as troubling as that is, though, we recently seem to also have added the idea that the president can act with impunity as long as it can be rationalized (however fabulously) as in the national interest. Presumably blowjobs are still verboten.

The courts have at times been all too eager to assist in this project, and on Monday the New York Times reported (via) their willingness to do so has unleashed some unintended consequences. The Supreme Court's Ashcroft v. Iqbal decision in May was a civil rights damages lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Javald Iqbal was swept up along with more than 1,000 other mostly Arabic people in America right after 9/11. He claimed mistreatment and filed suit against Ashcroft on the theory that responsibility goes to the top. The Court ruled that essentially unless Ashcroft was physically present and ordering the abuse he was not liable. In other words, in its eagerness to shield the executive branch from being held responsible for this or any other covert lawbreaking it substantially raised the evidentiary bar for lawsuits. Or as the Times described it, the ruling eviscerated discovery:

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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

On Tuesday lambert pointed out something I had not noticed: Talking Points Memo had not covered Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs, and its coverage of them has been very light in recent months. Caveats: TPM advertises itself as "Breaking News and Analysis" and it gets to decide what is news and what merits analysis; Taibbi's article was a lengthy narrative in a magazine and not breaking news, similar to Todd Purdum's profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair this month; while a web site has nearly unlimited space to devote to news there are only so many hours in the day end workers to publish during it. There are any number of good reasons why a site like TPM would not have covered it.

It still seems a curious omission though. After all, Purdum's article got a brief mention and link on the front page. Financial scandals are covered there, and a search on Bernie Madoff brings up three pages of results. Like Martha Stewart before him Madoff seems to have become a synecdoche for the entire financial industry. Now, Stewart's crime was a half million dollar stock scam whereas Madoff's was a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, so the latter had a much larger impact. Still, it A) only affected private investors and B) is relatively small when compared to bailout, son of bailout and who knows what other giveaways we are only vaguely aware of at the moment. It seems that an article like Taibbi's would serve an important reminder as to what the stakes and who the biggest players really are.

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Last week digby posted on a report that the CIA is now looking to recruit Wall Street financial analysts to offer their guidance on economic matters. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the CIA's retirement program is a government pension and not a 401(k). She followed up this week by pulling a May 2006 Business Week article from Dawn Kopecki back from the memory hole. The BW piece reports on a 1977 amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that allows the president to exempt companies from accounting and reporting requirements in the name of national security. (Think presidents Bush or Obama have considered national security at stake during the economic crisis?) One of the comments to the article is fascinating:

Last December I cross-posted my Best Music of 2008 piece over here and got some great tips from some of the regulars. Obviously they were too late to include in the list so this year I decided to do a midyear call for favorites as well. Great tips may end up on this December's list. Drop suggestions in the comments, and if possible include an active link to a free mp3 so we can try before we buy. Here's what I'm digging so far in 2009:

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M.E. Dabiri:

A white-haired man emerged from the mosque to tell his wife who was standing in line in front of me, "There are about fifty people ahead of us."

As we entered the mosque, a guard who was standing at the door, looked down at the girls and said, "You have come to vote, too?"

I was essentially witnessing a nation voting for the first time in 2,500 years.

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Last week Andy McCarthy prompted the latest change in my understanding in how the right thinks about torture. Initially I believed they were unwilling to accept their leaders were engaging in it, and that if it turned out they were they would recoil as sharply as the rest of us. That changed when I read a Los Angeles Times piece by Jonah Goldberg that basically stipulated we tortured but was fine with it anyway. It may have been this one, where he writes:

the meatier part of the argument is in the more nuanced area of "coercive measures," "stress positions" and what one unnamed official once described to the Wall Street Journal as "a little bit of smacky-face." [Since elaborated as "wrapp[ing] a collar around [a detainee's] neck and smash[ing] him over and over against a wall."]...The way [Andrew] Sullivan and those who agree with him see it, torture is torture is torture -- and torture is always wrong, even when defined as intimidation and "smacky-face." "Not in my name" is their rallying cry, often with the sort of self-righteousness that suggests that those who disagree must admire cruelty.

Reading that, it became clear that Bush's supporters were willing to uncritically accept the administration's positions. Techniques were given cute euphemisms (see also) and those who objected to it on principle were dismissed as moral divas. Moreover, their reflexive support meant ignoring torture's history. Engaging in practices with a gruesome past or lifting terminology from the Gestapo was never examined.