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McCain's scary economic advisorBut if Gramm's role as a banker and lobbyist is embarrassing to McCain, the greater harm is likely to be done by his economic advice. He and McCain have been friends since they were young congressional "foot soldiers in the Reagan revolution," as both like to say, and he is often touted (or was until lately) as a likely candidate for Treasury secretary should McCain win the White House.
Now that Gramm has resurfaced in national politics, he surely deserves to be arraigned for his long history of service to powerful interests, dating from the Enron scandal and beyond. But for most Americans, the dubious connections of McCain's lobbying pals, including Gramm, should be less worrisome than the likely results of yet another four years of Republican economic nostrums. Gramm's career stands for the false promises of right-wing ideology and the troubles that such schemes, embodied in legislation, have repeatedly inflicted on us.
The former Texas senator is less voluble these days than he used to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, but in years past he has boasted of his central role in key conservative legislation, especially in liberating major sectors of the economy and finance from public oversight and skewing taxation in favor of the wealthy.
So how has that worked out over the past few decades?
Back in the '80s, Gramm smiled upon the abrupt deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry, described by his idol Ronald Reagan as America's opportunity to "hit the jackpot" of growth. He used his political clout to protect the Texas operators whose crooked machinations eventually helped to bankrupt the S&L industry. In fact, the S&L debacle cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars
Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled U.S. on IraqFormer White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war."
McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a "lack of inquisitiveness," says the White House operated in "permanent campaign" mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president's inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative's name.
Beyond Belief"I feel safer down here among the Christian savages along Narragansett Bay than I do among the savage Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony," wrote Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, shortly after his exile from polite society in 1635. Williams was one of the great heretics of what Europeans deemed a new world, not least because he bothered to learn the languages and customs of those he found already living there. He knew the Native Americans he admired were not Christians in any doctrinal sense, but he believed they lived according to a spirit of brotherly love more fully than the Puritans of Massachusetts from whom he'd fled. Martha Nussbaum argues that Williams's friendships with Narragansett leaders in Rhode Island left him with the kind of nuanced understanding of tolerance that would become the bedrock of American religious freedom--and, what's more, liberty of conscience. What is the distinction? Religion is a set of beliefs, ideas, rituals or customs. Conscience is more fundamental: the faculty of searching for the beliefs, ideas, rituals or customs that make up religion or, for that matter, the rejection of religion. Conscience is "precious," she says, whether it's exercised or not, an insight she credits Williams with recognizing long before John Locke--due, in large part, to Williams's fascination with the non-Christian savages he encountered in the process of colonizing their land.
The contents of the Downing Street Minutes confirm that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war in Iraq, regardless of whether there was any credible justification for doing so. The Administration distorted and misrepresented the intelligence in its attempt to link Saddam Hussein with the terrorists of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, and with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have.
In addition, the Downing Street Minutes also confirm what has long been obvious – that the timing of the war was linked to the 2002 Congressional elections, and that the Administration’s planning for post-war Iraq was incompetent in all its aspects. The current continuing crisis is a direct result of that incompetence. ...
President Bush constantly talks about the 'progress' that is being made in Iraq against the insurgency, but he’s looking for good news with a microscope. All anyone can see is 'Mission Mis-accomplished' and the continuing losses of American lives, the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the torture scandal, and the ominous decline in our nation's moral authority in the world community.
We know the Administration had been planning to invade Iraq for many months before the invasion actually began. We know the Administration twisted the intelligence to make the facts fit their plan. We know that the Administration never really intended to give the U.N. weapons inspectors a reasonable chance to succeed. The Downing Street Minutes demonstrate that the Administration knew their case for war was paper thin, and that in order to go into war with the support of our allies, we had to demonstrate some willingness to go along with the UN inspection process. But the Administration continued to misuse its intelligence, distort the facts and pay only lip-service to the UN’s role in disarming Iraq.
We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence. The Downing Street Minutes provide even more proof that this is exactly what happened on Iraq. The Administration's dishonesty, lack of candor, and lack of planning have brought us to where we are today, with American soldiers dying, Iraqi civilians living in constant fear, and with no clearer picture of our strategy for victory in Iraq than when we started.
---Sen. Ted Kennedy, June, 2005
Sun-Sentinel uncritically reported Florida GOP official's comment that "I wish Obama would not pretend to care about the Jewish community"In a May 17 article, South Florida Sun-Sentinel Washington bureau chief William E. Gibson reported that Republicans "are preparing to attack [Sen. Barack] Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal who poses a threat to Israel's security." He also wrote: "Republicans hope to win the state by reducing the Democratic advantage in South Florida, particularly among Jewish voters. They point to Obama's willingness to meet with leaders of Iran and other nations hostile to Israel." But after laying out the Republicans' purported strategy against Obama in Florida, rather than providing a response from the Obama campaign or a Democratic Party representative to the reported attacks, Gibson quoted Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, saying, "This is a terrible thing," and adding, "I wish Obama would not pretend to care about the Jewish community." Indeed, aside from reporting that among the "special messages tailored to Floridians" that Obama will offer is a "promise" to Jewish leaders to "help safeguard Israel," Gibson did not quote or reference anyone defending Obama's commitment to Israel and the Jewish community. Moreover, despite noting Republicans' criticism of "Obama's willingness to meet with leaders of Iran," at no point did Gibson mention that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has also reportedly stated that the United States needs to be willing to "sit down and talk" with Iran.
Democracy in America
The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy“.
Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”
Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.
The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.
The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.
Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.
Back in the USSRHow would you like a glamorous trip to a foreign country on the government’s tab?
If you’re a nurse, you may have seen the ads. “Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations? Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true…”
What do you have to do? According to the Washington Post on Wednesday, travel with people who are being deported from the United States — to countries where they might very well be killed moments after landing — and shoot them full of powerful psychotropic drugs when they complain.
“The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged,” the Post reports.
The drugs? Haldol, which is used with schizophrenia patients. Ativan, a tranquilizer. Cogentin, a muscle relaxer helpful with Parkinson’s patients.
“Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals,” the Post said. Then the story quoted a specialist who pointed out — as if it needed to be pointed out — that giving these drugs to people who are not psychotic “is medically and ethically wrong.”
Often, deportees were given a “cocktail” of all three drugs at once. And they were given the shots many times — in detention, on the runway, on the plane, while changing planes.
Since this morally depraved practice not only violates any sense of decency that we might still have left as a country, but international law as well, it is interesting to note that during plane-changing layovers on the ground in Belgium and France, the nurses were not allowed to give their patients “booster shots.” They had to wait until they were back on a plane.
According to the Post, our government has been discussing deportee drugging for a long time. By the end of the Clinton administration, it had decided that it could be done “only if a federal judge gave permission in advance.”
Even after 9/11, the government was still “wary about drugging detainees.”
But Bush and Cheney rushed to the rescue. In early 2003, “They handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.”
The appropriately-named agency, according to an internal policy memo, decided that a detainee “with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior… may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances.”
And guess who got to determine what might be considered “combative”?
Today, more than 250 druggings, at least 83 deaths and two lawsuits against the U.S. government later, the rules may have been changed. Or they may not. And by the way, ICE has never asked for a court order.
Whistleblowers: The Canaries in the Coal MinesThe canaries are calling.
Look! In the sky. It’s absurd. It’s insane. No, it’s Irony Man.
Not Iron Man — Irony Man. News junkies know him as Scott Bloch, after it was reported last week that the FBI had raided the office of Special Counsel. In the wake of the raid, the National Whistleblower Center issued this statement, hinting at Bloch’s Irony Man identity:
“In a notably ironic turn of events …Bloch — who is charged with protecting federal whistleblowers — has been under investigation for, among other things, whistleblower retaliation within his own agency. Most of the whistleblower community has been disappointed with Bloch’s tenure in office. He had no actual expertise in the field and was viewed as a patronage appointment.”
I couldn’t get in touch with Bloch, but I think he would agree with my assessment that the FBI’s timing couldn’t be better — at least for the folks organizing “Whistleblower Week” in the nation’s capital, which happens to be this week!
But I was able to catch up with the president of No Fear Institute, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. NFI is organizing the Whistleblower Week conference.
Coleman-Adebayo was a senior Environmental Protection Agency representative to the White House under the Clinton administration. While serving on a special U.S. commission working with the South African government, she blew the whistle on the death she discovered was being wrought in South African communities where vanadium pentoxide is mined by poor villagers to supply the steel alloy America relies on for making bridges, airplanes, cars, even knives, forks and surgical instruments. Vanadium is one of the chemical compounds mixed with steel that allows it to bend and contract without breaking.
When Coleman-Adebayo found that lack of environmental regulations and labor laws in South Africa were literally killing poor miners and their families, Coleman-Adebayo tried to call attention to the silent killer. Her superiors told her to forget about it, but her refusal to forget about it led to her increasingly hostile ouster.
In August of 2000, a federal jury found the EPA guilty of violating her civil rights. Coleman-Adebayo became an activist and organized a grass-roots campaign that eventually led to the passage of the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act (the No FEAR Act), which was signed into law by President Bush in 2002.
A year later, Congress began to gut the law. Since then, Coleman-Adebayo and the rest of the whistleblower community has been working with congressional allies on new legislation. “One of the goals of Whistleblower week is to push for new legislation,” she told me on Mother’s Day.
One is called the Congressional Disclosure Protection Act, which is designed to protect workers against whistleblower retaliation if they should testify before Congress.
“Almost always, when you testify (as a whistleblower) before Congress, you are immediately retaliated against, usually fired. This Act will provide some protection when workers exercise their constitutional right to talk to Congress.”
Another law being advocated is the Civil Rights Tax Relief Act — to prevent the IRS from taxing compensatory damages awarded to whistleblowers whose civil rights were violated. When Coleman-Adebayo was compensated for the EPA’s retaliation, the IRS took half of it back in taxes! The Civil Tax Relief Act would end that foolishness.
“People don’t know it but they’ve gutted the 1964 Civil Rights Act through taxation. There are people who have gone into bankruptcy trying to get their day in court under a law that Dr. King died for.”
Then there’s No Fear Act II, designed to make No Fear I gut-proof by defining what disciplinary action must be taken by employers who violate workers civil rights in retaliation for whistle blowing, left undefined in No Fear I.
“I think it will go down as one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in history,” Coleman-Adebayo said.
Because she has seen corruption in federal government first hand through her experience in South Africa, Coleman-Adebayo believes “one of the most important things whoever the next president can do is to clean up the federal government.” (http://www.whistleblowers.org/html/2008_survey.html)
“We are hoping Senator Obama, Clinton or McCain will take up the mantle to clean up the corruption. Until the corruption is cleaned up, nothing the government does will work for the people. Whistleblowers are simply the canaries in the mine. We die off first — but not long after, the carbon dioxide comes out of the mines.”
“The whistleblower community is one of the most courageous communities I’ve been involved with. Through loss of jobs, families, even death, in some cases, they’ve made the decision to stand and fight. That’s what the week is all about — a community of people willing to stand up and fight for their country.”
Pentagon Releases Propaganda Documents -- Will the Media Pay Attention?Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.
The Pentagon program, which clearly violated U.S. law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.
News of the Pentagon's online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times "limited information about a military office early in the reporting process."
Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/
More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all."
The Violent Language of Republican Pundits Poisons Our DemocracyViolent language as a manner of speech amongst right-wing pundits reached a crescendo in the days leading up to the 2006 midterm elections. I remember flipping through TV channels one day, attempting to avoid pundits' violent rhetoric. But such language was everywhere. Anne Coulter joked about "nuking" Iran, Bill O'Reilly talked about the "war on Christmas," Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs spoke of the "invasion" and "conquest" of America by immigrants. I even came across a discussion of the "war against the war," in which an anti-war protest was discussed as if it was a war. Every political topic seemed clouded over by a right-wing pundit using violence language.
In the first few months after the 2006 mid-term elections, I penned several blog posts questioning whether the rise of violent rhetoric on the right might be a dangerous development that could possibly transform, through a sudden incident, into actual physical violence. Turning to the work of Hannah Arendt, in particular her masterful study of politics and violence, On Violence, I began to realize that the last significant violent turn in American political ideology and practice involved both the political right and the left. The late 1960s was a time, Arendt explained, where people increasingly believed that violence could actually produce controlled political outcomes. The result was an era in U.S. politics where a broad range of different political organizations and movements each took up violence, a product of the widespread acceptance of Mao Tse-tung's aphorism "Political power grows at the barrel of a gun." Arendt watched this moment lead to assassinations and mass chaos in urban centers, and thus argued that violence was problematic because it led to outcomes in politics that could not be controlled. Violence, she explained, drawing on a famous quote from Karl Marx, may be the birth pang of a new political body, but we would never say that labor pains were the cause of a birth. The same is true with violence, which occasionally happens at times of great political change but is not the cause of such change.
Arendt's thoughts on violence helped me to clarify several aspects of the trend in right-wing violent language that I was tracking in the media. First, I realized that the use of violent language was not accidental, but was the product of a shift in the political philosophy on which the right-wing punditry built their ideas. The shift was from a rhetoric of parody and burlesque to one of violence and accusation. Second, Arendt helped me to clarify exactly what role "violence" was playing in the worldview of the right-wing pundits. Most right-wing pundits see the power of the state as residing ultimately in the monopoly over violence, an idea that comes from the writings of German philosopher Max Weber. This, however, is not the political philosophy that guided the framers of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, violent rhetoric is not just a question of linguistic style, but a sign that a political philosophy in conflict with American deliberative democracy has captured the imagination of many right-wing pundits. Many factors have led to the emergence of violence among right-wing pundits, but the events of 9/11 seem central. In the wake of the attacks, right-wing pundits grew ever more convinced that the continued survival of United States depended on its willingness to use violence. The more violent language filled the airwaves of America's broadcast media, the more this new and disturbing logic of violence and power seemed to saturate public thinking. Lastly, Arendt's writing helped me to see that the American form of deliberative democratic politics itself was a form of government crafted as a replacement for earlier forms of rule by violence. In a discussion of American politics, the opposite of violence has never been nonviolence, but participation -- specifically, participation in deliberative democracy. The quintessential American town hall meetings that Jefferson imagined happening amongst small, mostly agricultural communities in rural colonial America were not just a system for accomplishing the needs of the people but a bulwark against tyrannical rule that resulted from a royal monopoly on all forms of power.
After considering the violent language from right-wing pundits, I began to see the language of America's elected leaders in a new light, particularly the rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. It was clear to me that from the start of its term in office, the Bush administration was unrivaled in its ability to manipulate the public via the media. As such, strong political ties to privately owned, right-wing broadcast media was its biggest political asset. Yet, beyond their ability to wield control of the means of communication in our country, President Bush and Vice President Cheney embraced violence as a structuring concept in their political speech.
President Bush first stepped in the direction of violent language in the week following the attacks of Sept. 11, when he gave a series of public statements during visits to the White House by foreign dignitaries and U.S. government employees. The stated theme of that week was the mounting of a campaign to fight terrorism on a global scale, but the agenda had much more to do with constructing a new persona for Bush through a series of violent statements threatening the perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11. Over and over again that week, Bush said, "We're going to smoke them out of their holes," talking about the impending operations to find the terrorists responsible for 9/11 as if he were a cowboy setting out to kill prairie animals. Attempting much more than a bad John Wayne impersonation in those speeches, Bush was boldly stepping across a line that most presidents rarely crossed: direct calls for the death of other human beings.
That was a week of unimaginable emotional anguish for most Americans, and Bush's foray into violent language was largely hailed as welcome bravado in response to an act of war. While researching my book on presidential speeches in the summer of 2006, I went back to the transcripts of Bush's post-9/11 appearances and found moments filled with glib references to death and killing. Speaking to employees at the Pentagon on Sept. 17, 2001, for example, Bush said the following in response to a reporter's question:
I know that this is a different type of enemy than we're used to. It's an enemy that likes to hide and burrow in, and their network is extensive. There are no rules. It's barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension. And they like to hit, and then they like to hide out. But we're going to smoke them out. And we're adjusting our thinking to the new type of enemy.
A sitting U.S. president's using his own voice to advocate graphic violence to the public signaled a disturbing change in our political system. Events can be relayed in a variety of ways. President Bush chose violent descriptions to sum up the problem. At first glance, one would assume that his words had the obvious impact of injecting fear into American consciousness. Indeed, they did. In the months that followed Sept. 11, 2001, the country grew more and more afraid of knife-yielding terrorists on planes and more afraid of hidden threats, as waves of panic spread back and forth across the country. President Bush's metaphoric description of terrorists as animals skilled at hiding and committing barbaric acts of murder led people to accept that safety and security could only be restored by an equally violent process of hunting and killing. The violence of 9/11 had made Americans nervous about danger from the skies. As President Bush began to describe hidden threats of "barbaric" violence, Americans began to worry about which dangerous persons might be hiding in their own communities, or standing behind them in the grocery store lines, or sitting one seat over on the subway.
President Bush's turn to violent language was foreshadowed by his prior interest in the bellicose foreign policy vision of right-wing think tanks that had been pushing violent foreign policy since the late 1990s, such as the Project For The New American Century.
Clinton/McCain Gas Tax 'Holiday' a JokeOver the past several days, some of the nation's leading economic and political pundits have weighed in critically on the proposal of both Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain to institute a gas tax holiday this summer.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times said on Tuesday that Clinton's idea, while less "evil" than McCain's, was still "pointless" and "disappointing."
One day later, Tom Friedman, also of the Times, called the idea "so ridiculous...it takes your breath away."
And Jonathan Alter of Newsweek piled on: "Hillary Clinton has now joined John McCain in proposing the most irresponsible policy idea of the year -- an idea that actually could aid the terrorists."
Surely, however, there must be someone out there not associated with a politician or a candidate who supported the idea of a gas tax reprieve -- especially if, as Clinton suggests, it would be paid for by an excess profits tax on oil companies.
I emailed Howard Wolfson, Clinton's spokesperson, asking him to put me in touch with an economic or environmental analyst who favored his boss' plan. He never wrote back.
So I took the task upon myself. I would call experts from all sides of the ideological aisle to get a sense of where the debate stood. In the end, every single analyst I surveyed judged the gas tax holiday proposal to be, roughly speaking, a silly, superfluous, or outright pandering idea.
I started with what I thought would be my best shot, the libertarians. Jerry Taylor, a fellow for the Cato Institute, unfortunately, called the proposal a "holiday from reality."
"What would happen more likely than not, gas taxes would be cut, but pump prices wouldn't go down, service stations would just continue charging what they are charging," he said. "I'm a Libertarian and I don't mind that. But you might not be a Libertarian and you might believe the federal treasury needs that money... Now if this were a permanent reduction of the tax, I would be all for it."
Alright, one "no." Perhaps the free-marketers would be of a different ilk. I was wrong.
"I think it is close to political pandering," said Max Schulz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. "It is bad policy and political gimmickry. If you want to deliver relief to folks you have to do more than just this little holiday from the gas tax. You have to address what is driving the price of crude oil, even problems with the weak dollar. You aren't going to win any points doing that, however. But you will get points if you get up and say let's suspend the gas tax for a few months... I never have seen the wisdom of playing gimmicks games of the tax code."
Who, I asked, would favor the proposal? "Political advisers to candidates," was Schulz's response. "It is entirely due to the focus of the presidential election coinciding with the summer."
The Arrogance and Duplicity of Brian Williams and NBC
That was just false. As I noted last week after I interviewed CNN's former anchor Aaron Brown, who offered a similar defense, these retired Generals -- certainly including McCaffrey -- repeatedly argued in support for the war and the ongoing occupation, not merely commented upon military tactics. But to NBC, the substantial financial interests of their "independent" military experts to advocate for the war were simply "not their interest." Of course, it's not all that surprising that NBC News doesn't consider these conflicts worth noting given that, as a subsidiary of General Electric, a corporation that also profits greatly from increased defense spending and wars, NBC News is plagued by the very same conflicts in its reporting on the Government's military policies.
* * * * *
Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as "independent" news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised.
More amazingly still, when Brian Williams is forced by a virtual mob on his blog yesterday finally to address this issue -- something he really couldn't avoid doing given that, the day before, he found time to analyze seven other NYT articles -- Williams cited McCaffrey and Downing as proof that they did nothing wrong, and insists that his and their credibility simply ought to be beyond reproach because they are good, patriotic men. But those two individuals in particular had all kinds of ties to the Government, the defense industry, and ideological groups which gave them vested interests in vigorous pro-war advocacy -- ties which NBC News knew about and failed to disclose, all while presenting these individuals to their millions of viewers as "independent." Is there anyone who thinks that behavior is anything other than deeply corrupt?
