GOP Enforcers Shoot Their Retreating Soldiers

 

Jonathan Chait

May 20, 2011 | 7:59 am

The Republican Party's fascinating and apparently suicidal reaction to the Paul Ryan budget continues to accelerate. In the New York special election, where the party is pouring in money and staffers are flying in from Washington, the party has revamped its message and closing with a message accusing Democrat Kathy Hochul of wanting to cut Medicare (based on her vague statement that "everything is on the table.") Dave Weigel reports:

Hochul marched into the kitchen of the restaurant and talked to Paul Lignos, a chef who'd worked at the restaurant for 25 years.

"I've been hearing different things, I haven't been able to follow everything," he said. "You don't want to cut Medicare, right?"

"No, no," said Hochul. She gave him a quick rebuttal to the ad Republicans are running, which says because Hochul wants entitlement spending "on the table," she wants to cut it.

But while Republicans on the electoral front lines frantically retreat, electoral enforcers are arriving from the rear, forcing them to the frontlines at gunpoint. Michael Baronedescribes Ryan's budget as "the platform of the Republican party." Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks write an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal laying down a marker that any GOP presidential candidate endorse the Ryan plan, or possibly a more radical version thereof. Likewise, WSJ op-ed columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnoses the base's lack of enthusiasm for its presidential field as stemming from its lack of Ryan-like budget proposals:

Look at the rising Republican stars, those who have excited voters: Mr. Ryan, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. What do these men have in common? None are what the press likes to classify as "militant right-wingers," who whip up the base with gay marriage or abortion. Most aren't even particularly big talkers or partisan firebrands. Even Mr. Christie, who can verbal with the best of them, directs most of his volleys at entrenched interests—not political opponents.

These politicians are, instead, getting marks as the party's "doers," the guys making things happen. They lay out the ugly problems and then lay out the tough solutions—despite political risk. The press initially declared each of these individuals clinically insane for taking on Medicare, Social Security, public-employee unions. Yet it has been precisely their willingness to do so that has won them some measure of admiration from a public that is in the mood for action.

Strassel's list is an interesting window into conservative psychology. She says it's a list of doers, but that isn't correct. Mitch Daniels, probably the most accomplished doer in the party, doesn't appear on it, probably because of his left-wing deviations. Marco Rubio does appear, though he's done nothing at all except make comically maximalist debt ceiling demands. Strassel's list is a marker of the degree to which uncompromising policy maximalism in general, and the Ryan budget in particular, have become a party litmus test. Even as the front-line troopsunderstand they have made a huge blunder, the party's base seems ever more determined to march forward.

Nancy Pelosi posts questionable chart on debt accumulation by Barack Obama, predecessors

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

Promotes a chart saying that Barack Obama has "increased the debt" by 16 percent, compared to George W. Bush, who increased it by 115 percent.

Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 in a chart posted on her Flickr account

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi posted this chart on her Flickr site, where it was later re-posted by a user on MoveOn.org. But we found major problems with its math and methodology.

A reader recently pointed us to a post on the website of MoveOn.org, a liberal group. The post features a bar graph titled, "Who Increased the Debt?" that offers figures for the past five presidents:

Ronald Reagan: Up 189 percent
George H.W. Bush: Up 55 percent
Bill Clinton: Up 37 percent
George W. Bush: Up 115 percent
Barack Obama: Up 16 percent

We can see why a liberal group would tout such numbers, since -- if accurate -- they offer powerful counterevidence to the claims by conservatives that President Barack Obama has been a spendthrift who’s set the nation on an unsustainable fiscal path.

But the reader who sent it to us was surprised to see the debt increase under Obama was so small. So we decided to check the numbers.

The chart actually comes from a Flickr pagebelonging to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who posted it on May 5, 2011. Specifically, the chart tracks "percent increase in public debt" for the five presidents during the following time periods -- January 1981 to January 1989 (Reagan), January 1989 to January 1993 (George H.W. Bush), January 1993 to January 2001 (Clinton), January 2001 to January 2009 (George W. Bush), and January 2009 to April 2011 (Obama).

We checked with Pelosi’s office to see what data they used to assemble the chart. They referred us to the U.S. Treasury’s "Debt to the Penny Calculator."

First, we should note that we interpreted the caption in Pelosi’s chart that reads "percent increase in public debt" to mean public debt, not gross federal debt. Public debt is debt held by the public, whereas gross federal debt includes both publicly held debt and debt held by the government, such as money in the Social Security trust fund.

Despite what the chart’s label suggested, the data we received from Pelosi’s office made clear that they had been using the gross federal debt number. So we’ll start with that figure.

We can quickly dispense with the figures for Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The "Debt to the Penny" calculator doesn’t go back further than 1993, but we were able to estimate the figures for debt under Reagan and the elder Bush by using data from the Office of Management and Budget. OMB’s numbers are calculated somewhat differently than Treasury’s, but the percentage increases were close enough to what the chart said that we’re not going to quibble over them. OMB has debt under Reagan increasing by 186 percent (the chart had said 189 percent) and by 54 percent under George H.W. Bush (compared to the 55 percent in the chart).

Instead, we’ll focus on the numbers for Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama.

From the online calculator, we requested the daily debt totals since 1993 and picked out the ones closest to the inauguration dates of those three presidents, as well as the end of the month of April 2011. Here’s what we came with for gross federal debt:

January 20, 1993 (end of George H.W. Bush and beginning of Clinton): $4.188 trillion
January 19, 2001 (end of Clinton and beginning of George W. Bush): $5.728 trillion
January 20, 2009 (end of George W. Bush and beginning of Obama): $10.627 trillion
April 29, 2011 (closing date of the chart): $14.288 trillion

This allows us to determine how much the debt rose under each president:

Under Clinton: Increase of $1.54 trillion, or 37 percent
Under George W. Bush: Increase of $4.899 trillion, or 86 percent
Under Obama: Increase of $3.661 trillion, or 34 percent

So we can dispense with Clinton -- in the chart, his figure is correct. But the chart is significantly off for both Bush and Obama. We found Bush to have an 86 percent increase, not 115 percent as the chart said. And we found the debt under Obama to be up by 34 percent, more than double the 16 percent cited in the chart.

We quickly discovered the source of the discrepancy: Whoever put the chart together used the date for Jan. 20, 2010 -- which is exactly one year to the day after Obama was sworn in -- rather than his actual inauguration date. We know this because Treasury says the debt for Jan. 20, 2010, was $12.327 trillion, which is the exact number cited on the supporting document that Pelosi’s office gave us.

However this error happened, it effectively took one year of rapidly escalating debt out of Obama’s column and put it into Bush’s, significantly skewing the numbers.

Using the corrected figures does mean that, superficially at least, Democrats have a point. The debt did still increase more, on a percentage basis, under Bush than it did under Obama. But other problems with the chart and its methodology undercut even this conclusion.

• Time ranges: Bush served a full eight-year term, while Obama had served just 27 months by the time the chart was compiled. If the Obama figure were to be scaled out to a full eight-year period, he’d have a debt increase of 121 percent rather than 34 percent, making his increase greater than Bush’s. To be fair, that would be a simplistic exercise -- but no less misleading than the chart.

• Public debt vs. gross debt: Not only did the chart say it was using one statistic and then use another, it also cherry-picked the one that showed the comparison in a more favorable light. According to OMB statistics, public debt rose by 70 percent under Bush, 16 percentage points more slowly than gross federal debt did. And according to the Treasury, the public debt rose by 53 percent under Obama, compared with the 34 percent rise in gross federal debt.

Those numbers would have shown the two presidents much closer in their debt creation records -- and that’s without even adjusting for the vastly different lengths of time in office.

• Debt vs. debt as a percentage of GDP: Some economists will tell you that it’s not the size of the debt per se, but rather the size of the debt relative to the nation’s gross domestic product. This helps minimize the complicating effect of economic cycles and inflation. So how do those numbers stack up? Using OMB statistics, here’s what we came up with, using public debt figures not adjusted for the president’s time in office:

Reagan: Up 14.9 percentage points
George H.W. Bush: Up 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: Down 13.4 percentage points
George W. Bush: Up 5.6 percentage points
Obama: Up 21.9 percentage points (through December 2010 only)

So by this measurement -- potentially a more important one -- Obama is the undisputed debt king of the last five presidents, rather than the guy who added a piddling amount to the debt, as Pelosi’s chart suggested. Of course, all this goes to show that statistics can be used -- and misused -- to bolster almost any argument.

After we presented our research to Pelosi's office, a spokesman acknowledged that the office had erred in assembling and posting the chart and that it was in the process of reposting it. The updated version – which corrects the mathematical error but not what we consider to be the three additional design flaws – can be found here.

That's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't change our rating since it only occurred as a result of our fact-checking. We find so much wrong with this chart that we don’t think it contains any significant approximation of the truth. It made a major calculation error that dramatically skewed the debt increase away from Obama and toward George W. Bush. It glossed over significant variations in time served in office. It cherry-picked the measurement that was favorable to its cause. And it is contradicted by statistics for GDP-adjusted debt, which show Obama to be the most, rather than the least, debt-creating president of the last five. None of this suggests that Obama can’t turn things around as the economy improves (and Democrats can also take some solace in the fact that Bill Clinton did remarkably well in all of our measurements). But in communicating which administrations contributed the most to growth of the debt, this chart is a failure. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Eric Schneiderman: One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street

Robert Scheer

May 18, 2011 

 

This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).

The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims... until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along.

Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.

In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general—a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable—the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.

At the same time, the SEC and other federal regulatory bodies are making sweetheart deals with the bankers to close off accountability for creating and collecting on more than a trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown—a meltdown that has seen the national debt grow by more than 50 percent, stuck us with an unyielding 9 percent unemployment and left 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or clinging desperately to underwater mortgages. On top of which an all-time high of 44 million people are living below the official poverty line and fewer new homes were started in April than at any other time in the past half century. With housing values still in free fall, we continue to make the bankers whole.

As Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times, the Justice Department division responsible for checking for fraud in the bankruptcy system has found a widespread pattern of deception by banks foreclosing homes, and she concluded: “So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.” Not really surprising given both the enormous hold of Wall Street money over the two major political parties and the revolving door through which executives travel between firms like Goldman Sachs and the top positions in the US Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. The financial crisis occurred only because Republicans and Democrats passed the laws that Wall Street lobbyists wrote ending reasonable banking industry regulation installed in the 1930s in response to the Depression. And when the greed they enabled threatened the foundations of our economy, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it was the bankers who were assisted into lifeboats that had no room for ordinary people.

Not surprising then to find all of the power players in on the latest deals: the Obama administration that had bailed out the banks but not troubled homeowners; the regulators and Fed officials who all looked the other way when the housing bubble was inflated; and the state attorneys general who backed away from going after the perpetrators of robo-signed mortgages and other scams used to foreclose homes.

But now Schneiderman has a chance to derail the deals, given that he is supported by the state’s tough 1921 Martin Act, which one of his predecessors as New York state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had used to good advantage in exposing the financial behemoths that are so heavily based in New York. The Wall Street Journal describes the Martin Act as “one of the most potent prosecutorial tools against financial fraud” because, as opposed to federal law, it doesn’t carry the more difficult standard of proving intent to defraud.

Last week, it was revealed that Schneiderman’s office has demanded an accounting from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as to the details of their past practice of securitizing those mortgage-based packages that proved so toxic. Maybe he will fail against such powerful forces, as did Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo after him, but it is a test worth watching, since no one else, from the White House on down, seems to be concerned with holding the bailed-out banks accountable for the massive pain and suffering they inflicted on the public. 

Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).

The New Corporate World Order

The False Debate on the Debt

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.
No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.
“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Rossand the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitzand brotherPaul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”
West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.
“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”
But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.
“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard”by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Bakerin Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.
“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.
“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.
“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley]and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”
AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
President Obama shakes hands with Princeton University professor Cornel West after speaking at the National Urban League’s 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington in July 2010.

Cornel West v. Barack Obama

Melissa Harris-Perry

May 17, 2011 

 Professor Cornel West is President Obama’s silenced, disregarded, disrespected moral conscience, according to Chris Hedges’s recent Truthdig column, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West went Ballistic.” In a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness, Professor West offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.

West begins with a bit of historical revision. West suggests that the President discarded him without provocation after he offered the Obama for America campaign his loyal service and prayers. But anyone with a casual knowledge of this rift knows it began during the Democratic primary not after the election. It began, not with a puffed up President, but when Cornel West’s “dear brother”Tavis Smiley threw a public tantrum because Senator Obama refused to attend Smiley's annual State of Black America. Smiley repeatedly suggested that his forum was the necessary black vetting space for the Democratic nominees. He needed to ask Obama and Clinton tough questions so that black America could get the answers it needed. But black America was doing a fine job making up its own mind in the primaries and didn’t need Smiley’s blessing to determine their own electoral preferences. Indeed, when Smiley got a chance to hold candidate Clinton “accountable” he spent more time fawning over her than probing about her symbolic or substantive policy stances that impacted black communities. Fiercely loyal to his friend, Professor West chose sides and began to undermine candidate Obama is small and large ways. Candidate Obama ceased calling West back because he was in the middle of a fierce campaign and West’s loyalties were, at best, divided. I suspect candidate Obama did not trust his “dear brother” to keep the campaign secrets and strategies. I also suspect he was not inaccurate in his hesitancy.

West may have had principled, even prophetic reasons, for choosing this outsider position relative to Obama, but it is dishonest to later frame that choice as a betrayal on the part of the President. After what I had written about Senator Clinton during the campaign I wasn't expecting an offer from the State Department.

Furthermore, West’s sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than ideological. In Hedges's article West claims that a true progressive would always put love of the people above concern with the elite and privileged. Then he complains, “I couldn’t get a ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration... We had to watch the thing in the hotel.” Let me get this straight—the tenured, Princeton professor who collects five figures for public lectures was relegated to a hotel television while an anonymous hotel worker got tickets to the inauguration! What kind of crazy, mixed up class politics are these? Wait a minute…

What exactly is so irritating to West about inaugural ticket-gate? It can't be a claim that the black, progressive intellectual community was unrepresented. Yale's Elizabeth Alexander was the poet that cold morning. It can't be that the "common man" was shut out because the Neighborhood Ball was reserved for the ordinary women and and men who worked to make Obama '08 possible. It must be a simple matter of jealous indignation. While I appreciate the humanness in such a reaction, it hardly counts as a prophetic critique.

Since the inaugural snub, Professor West has made his personal animosity and political criticism of the president his main public talking point. There was that hilariously bad documentary with Tavis Smiley and the rest of the Soul Patrol in 2009. There is the tiresome repetitiveness with which West invokes the name of his erstwhile Harvard nemesis Lawrence Summers as indicative of President Obama’s failed economic vision. And just a few weeks ago there was the eminently watchable screaming match on MSNBC where love-the-peoplc West called Rev. Al Sharpton a “mascot” for the Obama administration. Add to this three year screed the current Hedges article and it looks more like a pissing match than prophesy.

Take for example West's ad hominem attack on the President’s racial identity.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”

This comment is utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, MA and Princeton, NJ. And it is hard to see his claim that Obama is “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they” as anything other than a classic projection of his own comfortably ensconced life at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.

Let me be clear, being an Ivy League professor does not mean that one has no room to offer critical engagement on issues of race. Like Professor West, I too make my living at elite, predominately white institutions. For the past five years we were on the same payroll at Princeton. Like Professor West I supplement my income by giving lectures about race, politics, and history. Like West I hope to influence policy, inspire individuals, and intervene in public conversations about race. My criticism of West is his seeming unwillingness to acknowledge how our structural positions within the academy and in public intellectual life can be just as compromising to our position vis-à-vis black communities as is President Obama’s.

As tenured professors Cornel West and I are not meaningfully accountable, no matter what our love, commitment, or self-delusions tell us. President Obama, as an elected official, can, in fact, be voted out of his job. We can’t. That is a difference that matters. As West derides the President’s economic policies he remains silent on his friend Tavis Smiley’s relationship with Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, and McDonald's—all corporations whose invasive and predatory actions in poor and black communities have been the target of progressive organizing for decades. I have never heard him take Tavis Smiley to task for helping convince black Americans to enter into predatory mortgages. I’ve never heard him ask whether Tavis' decision to publish R. Kelley’s memoirs might be a less than progressive decision. He doesn’t hold Tavis accountable because Tavis is his friend and he is loyal. I respect that, but I also know that if he were in elected office the could not get off so easily. Opposition research would point out the hypocrisy in his public positions in a way that would make him vulnerable come election time. As a media personality and professor he is safely ensconced in a system that can never vote him off the island. I think an honest critique of Obama has to begin by acknowledging his own privileges.

Instead, West seems determined to keep black politics tethered to a patronage model of politics. He tells Hedges:

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested…”

God help us if Cornel West and Tavis Smiley getting arrested is our last chance at a democratic awakening.

I have many criticisms of the Obama administration. I wrote angrily about his choice of Rick Warren to deliver a prayer at the inauguration. I have spoken on television about my disagreement with drone attacks in Pakistan and been critical of the administration’s initial choice to prosecute DADT cases. I worked for more progressive health care reform legislation and supported organizations that resisted the reproductive rights “compromises” in the bill. I’ve been scathing in public remarks and writings about the President’s education policy. My husband leads a non-profit that is suing HUD for its implementation of a discriminatory formula in the post-Katrina Road Home program. The president has never called me. I got my ticket to the inauguration from Canada! (Because Canadian Broadcast Television who gave me a chance to narrate the day’s events.) But I can tell the difference between a substantive criticism and a personal attack. It is clear to me that West’s ego, not the health of American democracy, is the wounded creature in this story.

 

Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry at Odds on Obama's Performance

The Ed Show

May 18, 2011 

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In a recent interview by Chris Hedges at Truthdig, Princeton Professor Cornel West provided a blunt critique of Barack Obama, saying the president “lacks backbone.” Last night on The Ed Show, West further explains this statement saying that the president lacks backbone for “poor children, abused workers, those unfairly incarcerated, those middle class folks experiencing downward mobility and confronting the Wall Street Oligarchy and the corporate plutocrats.”

The Nation’s Melissa Harris-Perry responded, both on The Ed Show and in a piece called “Cornel West v. Barack Obama,” calling West’s assertions disingenuous and vague. She points to actions the president has taken to speak for America’s underrepresented such as his Supreme Court nominations and signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

—Sara Jerving

Opening Doors

 

 

Hank, the VA's Ms. Patricia Bradford, HUD's Ed Jennings and DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis attend the event "Opening Doors" -- a strategy the defeat veteran homelessness.

Posted by Barbara Poppe on June 16, 2010 at 09:35 AM EDT

I'm excited to announce that on Tuesday, June 22, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) will release the nation’s first comprehensive strategy to prevent and end homelessness titled "Opening Doors: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness". The Council is an independent agency composed of 19 Cabinet Secretaries and agency heads that coordinates the federal response to homelessness. "Opening Doors" will serve as a roadmap for joint action by Council agencies to guide the development of programs and budget proposals towards a set of measurable targets.

Each night, 640,000 men, women, and children in the United States are without housing. The HEARTH Act ,signed into law by President Obama in May 2009, mandated that USICH produce a “national strategic plan” to end homelessness to Congress.  Beginning in January 2010, USICH held regional stakeholder meetings, organized federal working groups focused on specific populations, solicited public comment through an interactive website, and engaged experts from across the country to develop an action plan to solve homelessness for veterans, adults, families, youth, and children.

We will be announcing the historic plan at the White House at 9:00 AM EDT with four Cabinet Secretaries: HUD Secretary and USICH Chair Shaun Donovan, Labor Secretary and USICH Vice Chair Hilda Solis, VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. We welcome the country to join us during the announcement, by watching it live on WhiteHouse.gov/live. "Opening Doors" will be available atwww.usich.gov and www.hud.gov.

USICH is eager to share "Opening Doors" with communities across the country. After we release the Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, the real challenge will be implementation. While by name it is a federal plan, the federal role is meant to be collaborative. USICH and its 19 member agencies looks forward to working together with Congress, mayors, legislatures, advocates, providers, nonprofits, faith-based and community organizations, and business and philanthropic leaders to achieve the vision of Opening Doors: “No one should experience homelessness -- no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home.”

Barbara Poppe is Executive Director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness

One Year On: The Unmaking of Bradley Manning, Part II

Greg Mitchell

May 19, 2011 

 

After several weeks of intense attention, Pvt. Bradley Manning began to slip off the media’s radar screens again last month with his  transfer from the maximum security brig at Quantico to a medium-custody military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, while he awaits trial.   That is about to change again, as the first anniversary of his alleged online “chatting” with convicted hacker Adrian Lamo -- it  led to his arrest on multiple charges of leaking classified information -- arrives on Friday.    Next Tuesday, PBS Frontline plans a full program on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and they  promise to air new information.

I’ll be previewing the Frontline show later this week, and in other articles analyzing the Lamo logs and other aspects of the case,  but for now let’s turn to the  now infamous “chats”  --and the arrest that followed. Much of this is drawn from my current book and e-book, Bradley Manning: Truth and Consequences.

On June 6, a little over two weeks after Wired’s Lamo profile appeared, major news arrived out of nowhere. Wired’s popular Threat Level blog reported that “an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S.combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables to whistleblower site Wikileaks,” had been arrested by the military.

Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter wrote:  “Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody inKuwait and has not been formally charged.”  Manning was “turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online,” they related. “In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that WikiLeaks posted online in April….

 “Manning came to the attention of the F.B.I. and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail.” 

Wired quoted from some of the alleged chat logs.  In one, Manning asked Lamo (photo above) , “If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?”   On security:  “it was vulnerable as fuck ... no one suspected a thing ... kind of sad ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm.”  In any case the information “belongs in the public domain ... information should be free…. I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Referring to the Collateral Murder video, Manning said, in the logs, he had passed the video to WikiLeaks in February, after the successful transmission of his Reykjavik13 “test document.”

The WikiLeaks feed at Twitter responded to the surprising Wired piece with three comments:  “We never collect personal information on our sources, so we are unable as yet to confirm the Manning story.”  “Allegations in Wiredthat we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”  “If Brad Manning, 22, is the Collateral Murder & Garani massacre whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero.”    The national media picked up the trail the following day.

Manning’s purported exchanges with Lamo had all taken place during a single week, starting on May 21.  Lamo claimed Manning emailed him after finding his name online connected to a film he’d been involved with (he had suggested viewers donate to WikiLeaks). The next day, getting no response, the soldier contacted him via IM – apparently after reading that Wired profile.   

Lamo told The New York Times that it seemed from the online chatting that Manning “was just grabbing information from where he could get it and trying to leak it.”  Lamo had turned over copies of his chat logs with Manning to Army investigators.

 WikiLeaks on Twitter denounced Lamo and Poulsen as “notorious felons, informers & manipulators” and so “journalists should take care.”   Lamo offered his own tweets:  “I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of duty.” “I would never (and have never) outed an Ordinary Decent Criminal. There’s a difference.”  “I know what it’s like to be 22, scared, and in shackles too. I’ve been there. I hope none of you ever have to make a choice like this.”

It wasn’t known if Lamo was the main, or sole, source in the case against Manning.  He claimed he had turned in Manning because he was worried that disclosure of the information would put people’s lives in danger, the Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller reported.   Asked by Bumiller to discuss what he saw as Manning’s motives, Lamo replied: “Ideology. I think he was dissatisfied with certain military policies and he wanted to adversely affect  U.S. foreign policy…It’s a personal matter for him, and I do not think it was one his family would want aired in the national media.”

 In fact, Manning had cited (in the chat logs) a specific incident that inspired him to take action:

 “i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing ‘anti-Iraqi literature’… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the ‘bad guys’ were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki…]

“i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign “political critique titled ‘Where did the money go?’ and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…

“everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently…i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…"

Another key revelation in the chat logs was Manning’s reference to U.S. diplomatic cables — “260,000 in all” — that he had allegedly leaked.  He said, “it’s impossible for any one human to read all quarter-million…and not feel overwhelmed… and possibly desensitized” and “the scope is so broad… and yet the depth so rich.”  And:  “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack.”

Wired had talked to Manning’s father. “I was in the military for five years,” Brian Manning said. “I had a secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

Bradley Manning, after being reprimanded in a disciplinary case, had been demoted from specialist to private first class.   He allegedly told Adrian Lamo that he was about to be discharged because of an “adjustment disorder,” but the military denied this. 

His father told Wired his son “is a good kid.  Never been in trouble.  Never been on drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

Next,  Part III --  More from the "chat logs" as the mystery deepens.

One Year Ago: The Unmaking of Bradley Manning

Book Excerpt, Part II: Bradley Manning, From Boston to Baghdad

The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Monday—Day 107

Why Bradley Manning Is a Patriot, Not a Criminal

What We Learned From WikiLeaks

The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Friday, Day 174

Greg Mitchell

 

The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Thursday, Day 173

Greg Mitchell

One Year Ago: The Unmaking of Bradley Manning

Greg Mitchell

May 18, 2011 

 

After several weeks of intense attention, Pvt. Bradley Manning began to slip off the media’s radar screens again last month with his  transfer from the maximum security brig at Quantico to a medium-custody military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, while he awaits trial.   That is about to change again, as the first anniversary of his alleged online “chatting” with convicted hacker Adrian Lamo -- it  led to his arrest on multiple charges of leaking classified information -- arrives later this week. Next Tuesday, PBS Frontline plans a full program on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and they  promise to air new information.

I’ll be previewing the Frontline show later this week, and in other articles analyzing the Lamo logs and other aspects of the case,  but for now let’s return to the sequence of events leading up to the now infamous “chats.”  Much of this is drawn from my current bookand e-book, Bradley Manning: Truth and Consequences.

On February 18, 2010, WikiLeaks posted on its Web site a U.S. State Department diplomatic cable dated January 13, 2010, from the embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland.  It was an intriguing, if not earthshaking, document that would later earn the tag “Reykjavik13.”  In the cable, the U.S. deputy chief of mission, Sam Watson, described private talks with Icelandic leaders over a referendum on whether to repay losses from a bank failure, with the real possibility that Iceland could default in 2011.

 In the “chat log,” Manning would claim that he sent Reykjavik 13 to WikiLeaks as a “test document” from much more to come.

 If, in fact, Spc. Bradley Manning came to contact WikiLeaks (anonymously, if at all, Assange insists) during this period, how did it come about?  One must rely largely on the “chat logs” that allegedly document the lengthy discussions between Manning and convicted hacker Adrian Lamo from May 21 to May 25, 2010. Little other evidence against Manning has surfaced, at least publicly – although we know the Army seized his computers -- and even the validity of the chats logs have been called into question, both because of what appears there and what’s been edited out.  The prisoner, of course, is innocent until proven guilty.

 With that said, the chat logs suggest that Manning told Lamo that he first contacted WikiLeaks back in late-November 2010, after Wikileaks posted thousands of pager messages from 9/11.  ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he IMed Lamo.  By then, he had been probing classified military and government networks for months, and saw that they contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C.,” he told Lamo.

 Then he discovered a graphic video of an attack on what seemed to be Iraqi civilians by U.S. Apache gunships back on July 12, 2007.  Perhaps the most questionable aspect of the attack came after a van arrived to take one or more of the badly wounded from the scene, probably to a hospital.  Fire from the Apache obliterated the van. “At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning supposedly wrote to Lamo much later. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

When he returned to Baghdad on February 11 after a trip to the U.S., Manning went into leak mode – according to the chat logs.  He would tell Lamo that in February he transmitted to WikiLeaks the Reykjavik13 cable, the 2007 Iraq Apache video; a video of a May 2009 air attack near Garani in Afghanistan that may have killed almost 100 civilians, including many children; a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables from embassies around the world; and possibly much more.

On a somewhat amusing note, the soldier claimed he also leaked a 32-page classified Army study from 2008 — on the threat posed by WikiLeaks to inspire and publish such leaks.   WikiLeaks had published it on March 15, producing a highly embarrassing moment for the Pentagon.

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks posted on its site the Iraq video, now titled Collateral Murder.   It showed U.S. Army Apache helicopter air strikes in an eastern district of Baghdad in July 2007, which killed two staffers for Reuters and a dozen or more others. WikiLeaks said it had obtained the video from unnamed “whistleblowers” in the military. 

The video drew a massive worldwide audience, quickly reaching millions.  Now WikiLeaks had fully arrived – as a concept, as an organization, as a media fixture in America. 

But media coverage of Collateral Murder died quickly, and very little of the actual video was ever aired on national television in America.  But the saga of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning was about to take a fateful turn, partly due to a run-of-the-mill online profile.

The article by editor Kevin Poulsen (he's pictured above with Manning)  at Wired magazine’s site on May 20 opened on a richly ironic note (as it would turn out): “Last month Adrian Lamo, a man once hunted by the FBI, did something contrary to his nature. He picked up a pay phone outside a Northern California supermarket and called the cops.”

When police arrived, Lamo, 29, told them his backpack carrying anti-depressants had been stolen.  They listened to his halting speech, then put him on a stretcher and took him to an emergency room.  Then he was transferred to Woodland Memorial Hospital near Sacramento, and placed on a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold under a state law allowing this for those judged dangerous or unable to care for themselves. That stay was extended to nine days, and when he was discharged on May 7, he had a new diagnosis: Asperger’s Disorder. 

By then, Lamo had called Poulsen to tell him about his plight.  Poulsen, who had known and written about Lamo for the past decade, felt this human interest story was worth a profile for Wired.  Lamo was something of a fallen celebrity in geekworld, famous nearly a decade earlier for hacking sites such as Reuters, Microsoft, and Excite, notifying the press soon afterward and sometimes helping the targets identify their security holes.  That ended in 2002, however, when he added his name to a list of New York Times op-ed contributors at their site, the FBI was alerted, and he would end up sentenced to six months of house arrest (at his parents’ home) and two years of probation. Years of wandering and depression followed.   He became known as “The Homeless Hacker.”

Now Poulsen wrote, “For his part, Lamo thinks Asperger’s might explain his knack for slipping into corporate networks — he usually operated with little more than a web browser and a lot of hunch work. ‘I have always maintained that what I did isn’t necessarily technical, it’s about seeing things differently,’ he says. ‘So if my brain is wired differently, that makes sense.’”

 The sympathetic article apparently caught the eye of a young Army private halfway around the world, who thought he saw the world a little differently himself, helping set off a chain of events with frightening consequences, especially for the soldier, after he contacted Lamo directly.

NEXT:  Will  Frontline tie Manning directly to Assange?

One Year On: The Unmaking of Bradley Manning, Part II

Dan Ellsberg and 'Saving Private Manning'

The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog for Wednesday, Day 123