Archive for May, 2008
May 31st, 2008 by Jon Taplin
Yesterday it was revealed that Federal Regulators have been looking into the manipulation of commodity futures trading over the last six months. But as Congressman John Dingell pointed out, letting the CFTC lead this investigation is the classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.
“For too long, C.F.T.C. has been operating in the dark,” Mr. Dingell said. “Unfortunately, the C.F.T.C. has not proposed how to close off the loopholes that allow commodity index funds and others to take such massive positions that they possibly distort oil futures markets.”
It’s time for the Obama campaign to point out to the American public that the CFTC’s record of corruption was created by Phil Gramm (with assist from his wife Wendy). As David Corn points out in his devastating investigative article on Gramm, he birthed not only the coming commodity bubble but the sub-prime meltdown. And Phil Gramm is John McCain’s key economic adviser, who only yesterday McCain hailed as a self-less public servant.
Who’s to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He’s been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That’s right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
When the American people find out that Hedge Fund Billionaires have been gaming the oil futures market with 10% down payments, thanks to John McCain’s future Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm–Pat Buchanan’s old “Pitchfork Brigade” is gonna come looking for these two old coots (above) and its not going to be pretty.
May 31st, 2008 by Jon Taplin
Despite the spooky echoes of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in 2000, on the part of the Clintonistas at the Rules Committee hearing, the committee voted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegation with one half a vote each. My guess is the final victory of Obama will come with the votes of Montana on Tuesday evening.
Two details. Harold Ickes threat to take the Michigan ruling to the credentials committee is the idle boast of a man who just realized he does not rule the DNC anymore. This is Barack’s party. Second, all the fulminating by the cable network talking heads about women not voting for Obama is nonsense. Only 24% of women favor overturning Roe v. Wade. Does anyone really think the other 76% of women are going to vote for John McCain so he can change the Supreme Court to do just that?
May 31st, 2008 by Jon Taplin
Col. Peter Brownback (above) was a retired Army judge who agreed to come down to Guantanamo to hear terrorism cases. He was assigned to a case of Omar Khadr, a 21 year old Canadian.
During a proceeding on May 8, Judge Brownback expressed irritation that military prosecutors had failed to turn over records of Mr. Khadr’s incarceration to defense lawyers. He threatened to stop pretrial proceedings if the records were not supplied by May 22. They met that deadline.
At the time, Judge Brownback said he had been “badgered and beaten and bruised” by the chief military prosecutor in the case, Maj. Jeffrey D. Groharing, to move the case toward a trial quickly.
Yesterday Col. Brownback was summarily dismissed without explanation, from the case by Maj. Groharing.
At a time when the duplicity of the Bush Administration policy is so evident, this is how we teach the world about the American rule of law.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5aVhLjT7UE&feature]
You asked for, you got it. James Brown’s famed show closer, complete with cape. If they gave an Oscar for Best Musical Stage Acting, this would win hands down. I once met James Brown’s former valet in Libreville, Gabon. He was working for the son of President Omar Bongo. He said it was much easier than carrying James off stage in the cape every night.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
Back in March I said that Obama’s campaign discipline was much more formidable than the MSM was giving him credit for. I still think this will all be over by the end of next week. In the meantime he is showing an ability to catch McCain in a gaffe and not let up.
John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s war in Iraq indefinitely; I want to end it. So there’s going to be a clear choice for the American people this November.
“But that’s not what John McCain’s been talking about the last few days. He’s been proposing a joint trip to Iraq that’s nothing more than a political stunt. He’s even been using it to raise a few dollars for his campaign. But it seems like Senator McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts, because yesterday – in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy – he stood up in Wisconsin and said, “We have drawn down to pre-surge levels” in Iraq.
“That’s not true, and anyone running for Commander-in-Chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq – 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer – that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Senator McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to “nitpicking.”
“Well I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCIyzNISw1Q&eurl]
One of the more unlikely duets in history, but very cool all the same.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
The conversation spurred on by Ken Ballweg, countering Vaclav Klaus contention that environmentalism always turns to state coercion, leads me to a cool article in the Wall Street Journal about the nature of cooperation and freeloading. It turns out that freeloaders–who can range from people jumping the subway turnstiles to large corporations dumping their toxic waste in our rivers–actually can be shamed into decent behavior. But only in non-authoritarian societies.
In the most sweeping global study yet of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don’t. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior.
Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone’s benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.
In trying to understand the very big differences in the results from the different countries, the researches came to this conclusion.
Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.
It seems to me that the paranoia of people like Klaus, who experienced totalitarian regimes, may lead them to believe that cooperation around issues of climate change are not possible without state coercion. But this research shows that in most democratic societies, shaming of “freeloaders” like big polluters or drivers of Hummers, actually works.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
In 1968 and Egyptian scholar, going under the pen name of Dr. Fadl, began writing some of the early treatises justifying Jihad. One of his students was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the ideological leader of Al Qaeda. But last May, as depicted in a fascinating long piece in the current New Yorker Magazine by Lawrence Wright ( The Looming Tower), Dr. Fadl, publicly broke with Zawahiri and published a long manuscript denouncing the Muslim on Muslim violence of Al Qaeda.
The premise that opens “Rationalizing Jihad” is “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property.” Fadl then establishes a new set of rules for jihad, which essentially define most forms of terrorism as illegal under Islamic law and restrict the possibility of holy war to extremely rare circumstances. His argument may seem arcane, even to most Muslims, but to men who had risked their lives in order to carry out what they saw as the authentic precepts of their religion, every word assaulted their world view and brought into question their own chances for salvation.
Zawahiri, who had based most of his philosophy on Dr. Fadl’s earlier writings was forced to respond in a 200 page letter, attempting a point by point refutation of Fadl’s new thinking. When that failed to quell the outrage on Jihadist chat sites he took the extrordinary step of holding a virtual town hall meeting in an online forum.
A Saudi wondered how Muslims could justify supporting Al Qaeda, given its long history of indiscriminate murder. “Are there other ways and means in which the objectives of jihad can be achieved without killing people?” he asked. “Please do not use as a pretext what the Americans or others are doing. Muslims are supposed to be an example to the world in tolerance and lofty goals, not to become a gang whose only concern is revenge.” But Zawahiri was unable to rise to the questioner’s ethical challenge.
All of this philisophical discourse on the role of violence in Islam might seem irrelevant to a real world world where suicide bombers continue to wreak havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. But yesterday, CIA Director Hayden said that Al Qaeda has suffered a major loss of credibility in the region.
“Despite this ’cause célebrè’ phenomenon, fundamentally no one really liked al-Qaeda’s vision of the future,” Hayden said. As a result, the insurgency is viewed locally as “more and more a war of al-Qaeda against Iraqis,” he said. Hayden specifically cited the recent writings of prominent Sunni clerics — including some who used to support al-Qaeda — criticizing the group for its indiscriminant killing of Muslim civilians.
I continue to believe that if we get out of the way and let the Afghans and Iraqis handle Al Qaeda, the supposed “Clash of Civilizations”, based on a false belief that Islam is inherently violent, will turn out to be a mirage.
May 30th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
If you study the history of cultural diplomacy, as I do, you will find that bringing foreign students to the U.S. is one of the most effective tools of cross-cultural understanding available. Yesterday the Israeli government denied visas to every Palestinian student from Gaza who had been awarded Fulbright scholarships to study in the U.S.
“We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges,” said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. “So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.”
Instead of fighting for the students to get their visas, the U.S. simply withdrew the Fulbright Scholarships. Hadeel Abukwaik (above), who was set to study engineering software in the fall, was informed by email. Here was a classic opportunity for the American government to show some support for the Palestinians–and we just take a pass.
Pathetic.
May 29th, 2008 by Jon Taplin
As I said yesterday, McClellan’s contention that the networks were complicit in the War Propaganda campaign, were as damning as anything said about Bush. Now Jessica Yellin, who was at ABC during the run up to the war has spilled the beans on her bosses on Anderson Cooper’s show last night.
“The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings,” Yellin said.
“And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives – and I was not at this network at the time – but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president, I think over time….”
But then a shocked Cooper jumped in, asking, “You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?”
“Not in that exact…. They wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces,” Yellin said. “They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes, that was my experience.”
Michael Eisner (Disney/ABC), Bob Wright (GE/NBC), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp/Fox) and Sumner Redstone (Viacom/CBS) should be hauled before Congress to explain this. The broadcast licenses they hold are in the ”public interest, convenience, or necessity” not in the Bush administration’s “interest, convenience or necessity.”
UPDATE-Turns out Yellin was working for MSNBC, not ABC in the run up to the war.
