David Dayen Tuesday December 15, 2009 9:14 am

Lieberman Makes Grand Pronouncement, Ready To Vote For Health Care Bill

(...)

Lieberman said that the basic core bill, expanding coverage and “bending the cost curve,” is solid enough for him to merit his vote. He used the same arguments about spiraling deficits and potential bailouts as a reason to reject the public option.

Lieberman claims that he didn’t change his position on the Medicare buy-in, despite running on such a program in two national campaigns and touting it as recently as three months ago. He said that the party platform had Medicare buy-in during the 2000 campaign, and he was just an innocent bystander who happened to be the Vice-Presidential nominee of the party with no control over its goals or principles (the last part is mine). He added that the bill on the floor would offer generous subsidies and lower the age rating – not enough subsidies to prevent people ages 55-64 from paying $5,000 a year more that their younger counterparts. He said that the September interview with the Connecticut Post occurred before the Senate Finance Committee reported the subsidies in their bill, which is completely nutty, as the subsidies were in all original drafts.

Lieberman closed by calling the bill he essentially authored by proxy “an historic achievement, health care reform such as we’ve not seen in this country for decades.” He sounded like nobody so much as Nate Silver.

Susan Collins, who was standing next to Lieberman during this exchange, praised her colleague for making the bill better, but termed it “too deeply flawed for me to support.”

" We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence

Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

(...)

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

“Instead of fighting this war, we could be fighting for the people of West Virginia,” Senator Obama said today. “For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students. We could be fighting to put the American dream within reach for every American – by giving tax breaks to working families, offering relief to struggling homeowners, reversing President Bush’s cuts to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and protecting Social Security today, tomorrow, and forever. That’s what we could be doing instead of fighting this war.”


(...)


Five years ago, the war in Iraq began. And on this fifth anniversary, we honor the brave men and women who are serving this nation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. We pay tribute to the sacrifices of their families back home. And a grateful nation mourns the loss of our fallen heroes.

I understand that the first serviceman killed in Iraq was a native West Virginian, Marine 1st Lieutenant Shane Childers, who died five years ago tomorrow. And so on this anniversary, my thoughts and prayers go out to Lieutenant Childers’ family, and to all who’ve lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The costs of war are greatest for the troops and those who love them, but we know that war has other costs as well. Yesterday, I addressed some of these other costs in a speech on the strategic consequences of the Iraq war. I spoke about how this war has diverted us from fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and from addressing the other challenges of the 21st Century: violent extremism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

And today, I want to talk about another cost of this war – the toll it has taken on our economy. Because at a time when we’re on the brink of recession – when neighborhoods have For Sale signs outside every home, and working families are struggling to keep up with rising costs – ordinary Americans are paying a price for this war.

When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war.

When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war.

When a National Guard unit is over in Iraq and can’t help out during a hurricane in Louisiana or with floods here in West Virginia, our communities are paying a price for this war.

The Audit — February 27, 2009 08:45 AM
Audit Interview: Mark Pittman

“This is a defining moment for business journalism and for Wall Street.”

By Ryan Chittum

(UPDATE, November 29, 2009: Mark died a couple of days ago. It’s a huge loss and we’ll have more on him next week, but until then you can read some of what we’ve written about his exploits here. We wrote about when he and Bloomberg sued the Fed and when he won. Here’s Pittman with his friend and colleague Bob Ivry (who wrote Pittman’s excellent obituary), with a great profile of Elizabeth Warren last week. Here’s our look at how a Pittman story last September helped break the huge story of Goldman’s (and others’) backdoor bailout through AIG.

Here he is going after an incredibly complex story: How much are those toxic assets actually worth? And Pittman kept a close eye on the disastrously bad deals Uncle Sam cut for itself to benefit Wall Street. Watch him leverage the hot story, the AIG bonuses, to show how much bigger another story was, the bailouts of AIG’s counterparties.)


Mark Pittman has been all over this financial crisis.

He was part of a team at Bloomberg News that won the Loeb Award last year for a five-part series on the origins of the crisis called “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” including Pittman’s lead story on how the Street goosed the subprime mortgage market late with financial engineering.



In addition to the Loeb-winning work, Pittman has broken major stories on Goldman Sachs’s interest in the AIG bailout, Hank Paulson’s role in creating the subprime mess, and the ratings agencies inexplicable delays in downgrading mortgage securities, and he’s delved into how Wall Street spread its detritus across the world.

Germany's Doubts About Afghanistan Grow After Revelations About Air Strike
TIME/Cnn
By Henning Hoff Friday, Nov. 27, 2009

It was a great scoop. "Did Minister Jung conceal the truth?" Germany's mass-circulation tabloid Bild demanded to know Thursday in a story focused on the country's employment minister Franz Josef Jung and what details he knew and when, in his former job as defense minister, about the controversial air strike, calle

The strikes, by two U.S. fighter jets, killed some 142 Afghans near the northern city of Kunduz and continue to reverberate in Berlin. Called in by Colonel Georg Klein, then ISAF commander of the German-run Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) base in Kunduz, the operation was a rare moment of combat for Germany's armed forces, which mostly concentrate on rebuilding projects rather than chasing down Taliban fighters. Jung, who switched office last month following Germany's elections, initially claimed that only "Taliban terrorists" had been killed. But on Sept. 7 he conceded that there may have been some civilian casualties. (The number of civilians killed is now estimated to be up to 40.) According to Bild, however, the Bundeswehr (as Germany's Federal Defense Force is called) leadership and the ministry had known of civilian victims early on. Those reports were withheld from prosecutors, and also, apparently, from Jung's successor as defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

(snipping -- see full article)

The revelations come at a critical time. President Obama is due to reveal his new Afghanistan strategy in the next few days. If, as suspected, the U.S. deploys additional troops it's also likely to repeat calls for its allies to do likewise. But in Germany, where the Afghanistan mission is deeply unpopular, this incident and the alleged cover-up have raised fresh doubts about whether Germany should be there at all. Reflecting the mood, zu Guttenberg urged parliament to start "thinking the Afghanistan mission from its end," making the case for better-defined goals and an exit strategy. "There is a need for more clarity on how, and under which circumstances, the mission can end," he told the Bundestag.

The uproar in parliament and in the media overshadowed a visit to Berlin by the General Secretary of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was in town to make the case for increased efforts by European allies in Afghanistan. Chancellor Angela Merkel, at a press conference with Rasmussen, criticized the handling of the affair, saying: "If we want trust, we also have to have full transparency." Rasmussen pleaded that it was of the "utmost importance that an American announcement of an increased troop number in Afghanistan is followed by additional troop contributions from other allies." But that's likely to fall on deaf ears for now. The draft bill to extend Germany's deployment includes a provision to keep troops at their present level of no more than 4500 — the third largest contingent after the United States and Britain — but does not allow for increased numbers. (Read: "Much Work Ahead for German Chancellor Merkel.")

With headlines crying "lies" and the defense ministry badly damaged, many expect the affair to reinforce German opposition to the Afghanistan deployment, which is the most substantial deployment since the end of World War II, and is taking on the character of a fighting mission. Some see the affair as a chance for Germany's government, and the Western alliance more broadly, to have a real debate about strategic goals in the Hindu Kush. "Zu Guttenberg is likely to emerge strengthened from this", Volker Perthes, the head of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told TIME. "He is talking straight, which is appreciated by the German public."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...

Barofsky Sounds “Moral Hazard” Alarm in TARP Report and Congress Responds — With Misdirection

Jim White Friday November 20, 2009 7:51 am

(see full intro)


Yes, the AIG bailout was entirely secretive and probably only served to prop up Goldman Sachs, the home base of much of Obama’s financial team. But Barofsky is telling us that in addition to following the misapplication of funds in TARP, we face a renewed crisis if we do not address the structural problems that led to the crisis in the first place. We face the same crisis again if we do not restore the real risk of financial losses when big firms make large, risky gambles and lose.

While yesterday’s preliminary success on the auditing of the Fed was a giant first step in that direction, there doesn’t seem to be an effort from anyone in Washington to take on the real structural problems of the economy. In addition to auditing the Fed, where is the call for ending the conflict of interest for the bond ratings agencies? Where is the call to regulate the markets so that the gigantic players can’t bring the system down through overly risky behavior? Where is the call to restore risk to large financial firms?

The current calls for Geithner’s resignation flow from the fact, as Brady pointed out in his confrontation with Geithner, that "the public has lost all confidence" in Geithner. I suspect that the public is paying a lot more attention than Congress thinks. It looks to me as though Congress thinks that the misdirection of going after Geithner will be a convenient bone to throw to the public without doing anything of substance to correct the underlying structural problems in the financial system. I think the public has been paying close enough attention to realize that the system has not changed and that the risk of failure still is borne by the government rather than the parties taking the risks. It will be very interesting to follow the next few moves to see if any kind of true grassroots effort at real structural reform gathers steam.

It seems unlikely that Barofsky will be satisfied with merely replacing Geithner. Here is his biographical sketch from the SIGTARP website:



Since he comes from a background of unraveling financial crimes and pursuing fraud on the large scale, I expect Barofsky to continue pounding on the issue of the structural elements of the financial system still allowing the same problems that led to the meltdown. He may be our best hope of a movement toward meaningful reform.


http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/15504

FDL Statement on the Committee Passage of H.R. 1207, the Paul-Grayson Bill to Audit the Fed
By: Jane Hamsher Friday November 20, 2009 7:00 am

Alan Grayson has worked tirelessly since becoming a member of Congress to expose the corruption and lack of accountability at the Federal Reserve, and Firedoglake has been proud to support his efforts.

When nobody was really paying attention, Grayson began working to sign Democratic cosponsors to Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207, which authorizes the GAO to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed — something that has never been done it its history. Thanks to his efforts, the bill has gone from 190 to 311 bipartisan cosponsors.

When a last-minute attempt by leadership and the banks threatened to derail the Paul-Grayson bill, Firedoglake circulated a letter signed by labor leaders, noted economists, authors and financial bloggers to demonstrate progressive support for the effort. The letter pulled no punches, asserting that the Fed had “extended massive secret bailouts to major financial institutions” and calling upon Democrats on the Financial Services Committee to stand up to the banks by supporting the Paul-Grayson bill.

Despite the vocal opposition of Chairman Barney Frank and the fierce lobbying on the part of the central bank itself, 15 Democrats bucked leadership and the measure passed. According to the Huffington Post, “Key to winning Democratic support was a letter posted early Thursday from labor leaders and progressive economists” which was “organized by the liberal blog Firedoglake…Grayson was able to show Democratic colleagues that the liberal base was behind them.” During the committee debate, Grayson quoted from the letter.

more: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/11/1... /

Support Your Local Library
By: earlofhuntingdon Tuesday June 23, 2009 5:11 pm



A friend and librarian in Ohio sent me an open letter about the proposed budget cuts from Democratic Governor Ted Strickland. At wits end to meet budget shortfalls, he plans to cut the state's contribution to its library systems 50%.

Mr. Strickland is moderately progressive (less so than Sen. Brown, much more so than the Sen. Voinovich). But beset with auto and manufacturing plant closures (GM, Ford and Delphi among them), a decaying infrastructure, and a Republican legislature that thinks anything but war spending is a luxury, he's amputating limbs. Among state governors, he won't be alone. Arnold Schwarzenegger in California is similarly wielding the scythe among state agencies' budgets.

Some seventy percent of county libraries in Ohio depend exclusively on this funding, and it's important for the rest. Gov. Strickland's draconian, unplanned for cuts will mean the widespread closure of libraries the counties hardest hit by un- and underemployment. It will mean that even the state's best public libraries, such as Northeast Ohio's Cuyahoga County, one of the nation's top ten public libraries, will lose its essential part-time staff - those who answer questions, check books, record, clean and stack 'em on shelves so that you can find them - and many of its full time staff.

Government employees like librarians and library staff are the backbones of many small towns. Their jobs keep some families on their own, and allow others a modest luxury - like paying a portion of the ever rising cost of state university tuition. Their medical benefits keep thousands whole. And many of them are union jobs, with high standards that better serve the public and help keep employers honest. Library staff have been at the forefront in maintaining our civil liberties in the age of Bush, the Patriot Act and the FBI's abuse of its power to search and seize.

U.S. Relies on Tortured Evidence in Habeas Case
Government Submits Evidence Tossed in 2008 War Crimes Case
By Daphne Eviatar 6/23/09 1:44 PM

The United States is relying on evidence obtained by torture to prove that it can continue to imprison indefinitely a young man arrested as an adolescent in Afghanistan six and a half years ago, according to documents filed with a federal district court.

Mohammed Jawad may have been as young as 12 years old when he was seized by Afghan police and turned over to U.S. authorities in December 2002, according to a recent letter from the Afghan attorney general, who is requesting his return. Jawad is accused of throwing a hand grenade into a U.S. military vehicle and injuring two servicemen and their translator. But the primary evidence against him — his own confessions — were obtained by torture. Although the U.S. military commission created by President George W. Bush eventually charged him with war crimes for the attack in October 2007 — almost six years after the crime — a judge ruled in October 2008 that because they were tortured, his confessions were unreliable and inadmissible.


( read about his treatment in captivity-- he was at Bagram, and later at Guantanamo)


“They’re relying on everything they relied on in the military commissions, including statements that are the product of torture, including tortured statements they didn’t even appeal that were made to Afghan authorities,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project who represents Jawad in his habeas case. The United States did not appeal the ruling that the tortured confession to Afghan authorities was inadmissible, but relies upon it in its statement of facts to the federal court. Hafetz says the Justice Department’s lawyers are also relying on a written confession drafted by an Afghan police officer in Farsi that has Jawad’s thumbprint on it, although Jawad does not speak or read Farsi. (His native language is Pashto, though in any event he is illiterate.)

In January, five human rights groups sent President-elect Barack Obama a letter urging him to stop the prosecutions of child detainees.

The U.S. government is scheduled to appear before Judge Huvelle to defend its continued imprisonment of Jawad at Guantanamo and its reliance on tortured evidence on August 5.

Slaughter Vows to Fight New Senate Bill to Set Aside FOIA

Washington, DC –

Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter issued the following statement today, after the Senate agreed by unanimous consent last night to exempt any detainee photos taken since 2001 from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. “I’m disappointed that so many members of Congress have so little commitment to the Freedom of Information Act that they would set it aside for political expediency,” Slaughter said. “These photos are unlikely to show anything new and we do more harm than good by continuing to cover up the mistakes of the past. The press has a responsibility to hold government accountable and FOIA laws have been a crucial part of that process since 1966 when the Johnson Administration signed them into law. A free press has always been a hallmark of our freedoms and making detainee photos exempt from FOIA is a bad move and one I will oppose.”

### United States House of Representatives 312 The Capitol • Washington, DC 20515 (202) 225-9091 phone • (202) 225-1061 fax • www.rules.house.gov

OMB Watch

Senate Quietly Passes Bill to Hide Torture Evidence


On Wednesday night, the Senate quietly passed legislation to exempt photographs of detainees being tortured by U.S. personnel from the Freedom of Information Act. Further stunning the spirit of open government, they did so by unanimous consent.

http://www.ombwatch.org/node/10135#comment...

Obama may sign order banning abuse photos: congressman

Wed Jun 17, 6:51 AM


WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President Barack Obama may soon sign an executive order to block the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior congressman said Tuesday.


"I think the president has made his position pretty clear," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Obama's Democratic Party told reporters, stressing that Obama remained vehemently opposed to the sensitive photos' release because they could become instruments of propaganda against US troops.

"I think I have reason to believe that they (administration officials) are looking to that as an option so they can resolve this issue," Hoyer said, speaking of a possible executive order.

Top News June 4, 2009, 8:45AM EST
Study Links Medical Costs and Personal Bankruptcy

Harvard researchers say 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by health problems—and 78% of those filers had insurance

By Catherine Arnst

Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.

Medically related bankruptcies have been rising steadily for decades. In 1981, only 8% of families filing for bankruptcy cited a serious medical problem as the reason, while a 2001 study of bankruptcies in five states by the same researchers found that illness or medical bills contributed to 50% of all filings. This newest, nationwide study, conducted before the start of the current recession by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler of Harvard Medical School, Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, and Deborah Thorne, a sociology professor at Ohio University, found that the filers were for the most part solidly middle class before medical disaster hit. Two-thirds owned their home and three-fifths had gone to college.

The Next Terrorist Attack On US Soil Will Be Dick Cheney’s Fault
By: Jim White Wednesday June 3, 2009 7:08 am

(...)

Just to review, we have Cheney coming out five days after 9/11 to tell the world that the US would abandon human rights considerations in its fight against terrorism. Cheney takes the lead role in developing torture as a policy and even personally leads the effort to keep torture as a tool when Congress begins to rebel. What has this policy gotten us? Here's former interrogator Matthew Alexander, in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post:



Dick Cheney announced that we would ignore human rights in our intelligence gathering. He then instituted and approved a program of torture. He personally led the fight on Capitol Hill to keep torture going. Torture is the primary recruiting tool for al Qaeda.

The next time international terrorists attack the United States, there will be one person who should take the bulk of the blame: Dick Cheney.