3:48 PM
Debt relief for tsunami victims
The world’s most economically powerful nations announced today that they’ve agreed to suspend debt payments for those nations hit hardest by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Echoing British chancellor Gordon Brown’s calls earlier in the week, the Group of 7 (G7) has agreed to suspend payments for at least a year (though it hasn’t yet agreed to cancel the debt). As Brown said Friday:
"We must ensure that those countries are not prevented from paying for essential reconstruction because they are having to fund the servicing of their debts. So for afflicted countries that request it, the G7 is proposing an immediate suspension of debt repayments."And depending on the conclusions of the needs assessments, I believe that the G7 and Paris Club must also stand ready to consider all options for further assistance."
Canada has also agreed to suspend debt payments, and the tsunami tragedy is expected to spur further debate about debt forgiveness at this summer’s G8 summit.
So far, Australia’s government has been among the more skepticalin industrialized nations, with Prime Minister John Howard preferring a targeted-relief approach:
"There is no guarantee that if you [suspend payments] what is forgiven or what is the subject of a moratorium will end up going in aid, because the debts are not normally owed by people who need the assistance. They are usually owed by other organizations and you have no guarantee that if you provide a debt moratorium or debt forgiveness that that money ends up where it should."
To Howard’s credit, Australia leads the world in aid donations so far. But, of course, targeting aid where it is needed and relieving hard-hit governments of debt payments are not mutually exclusive.
According to the World Development Movement, Indonesia’s debt amounts to 80 percent of its GDP. That’s the highest among the countries hit, followed by Sri Lanka (59 percent), Thailand (48 percent), Maldives (45 percent) and India (21 percent). And there’s no way of calculating what preventative measures those governments could have taken if they weren’t paying such a large amount in debt.
Brown has called the debt moratorium part of a “new Marshall Plan” to help countries back on their feet. It’s only a first step, but a potentially historic one.
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3:10 PM
Think-tank roundup
What's percolating through the liberal think tanks lately? Hm, let's see…
Brookings: Anyone interested in an overview of Western policies to promote democracy in the Arab world should read this essay by Tamara Cofman Wittes. One of the biggest obstacles to reform, it seems, is the fact that the United States and Europe don't always see eye-to-eye on how this stuff should be accomplished. Europeans worry about short-term Arab immigration, so they tend to focus more on economic development in the Middle East. The U.S., meanwhile, worries about Salafist movements that target the United States for propping up Arab dictators, in which case democracy is really the highest concern. Also: a letter on why Washington should embrace the European Union.
Century Foundation: Haven't had enough election talk? Election expert Tova Andrea Wang has two essays on what went wrong in the 2004 election. Ballot problems, machine failures, possible fraud. It's all here. Meanwhile, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira—the guys who predicted an "Emerging Democratic Majority" in 2002—try to figure out whether the country's demographics still, in fact, favor an emerging Democratic majority.
Council of Foreign Relations: There's an interesting interview with Indonesia expert Sidney Jones, who wonders aloud whether America's reaction to the tsunami tragedy will repair relations between the U.S. and Indonesian Muslims. Meanwhile, if you have the chance, read the transcript of this symposium about women's issues in foreign policy. It's worth it.
CSIS: Iraq expert Anthony Cordesman takes an in-depth look (PDF) at the insurgency in Iraq, arguing that Sunni fighters are becoming more numerous, more sophisticated, and better organized. He also notes that the insurgency is more adept at manipulating the media. Indeed, from what I've heard elsewhere, insurgents will often have a statement ready for Al-Jazirah and Al-Arabiyah immediately after an attack, while the U.S. military fumbles for a response. Quite odd for an administration that's so good at sweet-talking the media here at home.
Economic Policy Institute: No surprise, the EPI grades the Bush tax cuts on their ability to produce jobs and finds that… they've failed utterly. EPI also notes that the gender wage gap is shrinking… but mostly because male-dominated industries, like manufacturing, are shedding jobs. Yikes.
Public Citizen: Two reports doing yeoman's work on tort reform. The first chronicles how the president has distorted (or, ahem, "dis-torted") the facts about lawsuits and their impact on health care and the economy. The second argues that Bush's actual proposed reforms won't really help the economy at all.
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1:20 PM
South Sudan peace deal set for signing
Barring any last-minute surprises, the agreed-upon peace deal for southern Sudan will be signed on Sunday in Nairobi.
But as Human Rights Watch points out, the agreement has no mechanism to prosecute possible war crimes committed during the 21-year civil war there (and there's a history of such abuses). Also, of course:
"The peace agreement is an important step, but lasting peace in Sudan will require genuine security for civilians and justice for the atrocities committed both in Darfur and southern Sudan," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa division. "Even as the Naivasha agreement is being celebrated in the South, people are being raped and burned out of their homes in Darfur. The Security Council must clearly send Sudan the message that there will be no impunity for crimes of this magnitude."
This weekend’s signing is expected to be one of Colin Powell’s last trips as secretary of state. Sadly, he probably won’t get to use it to put pressure on Khartoum.
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12:28 PM
At least someone's fully funded!
Schools are crumbling, many students work without textbooks, and some states have resorted to a four-day school week to stave off budget crises. But don't tell any of that to conservative pundit Armstrong Williams—he thinks everything's just fine. And with good reason: Greg Toppo of USA Today reports that the Bush administration, trying to build support for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) among black families, "paid the prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same." Yes, that's taxpayer money supporting a campaign to promote education policies that are actually hurting low-income schools nationwide. The deal required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige throughout 2004.
The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, George Miller, called the contract "a very questionable use of taxpayers' money" that is "probably illegal." He will seek Republican support for a full investigation that could raise further scrutiny of payments for this and any other propaganda commissioned by the administration. Hopefully, Bush, Williams, and others will be held to the same increased accountability that forms the basis for the NCLB Act.
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12:17 PM
One fence-sitter down
A little good news on the Social Security front, via Friday’s Wasington Post. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has come out against the president’s privatization plan:
Mr. Baucus's position will make it difficult for the White House to obtain the Democratic votes necessary for the measure to get through the Senate."I seriously doubt I'm going to be the linchpin this time," Mr. Baucus, the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in an interview.
The president's plan to allow workers to divert part of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts would "exacerbate the problem, not solve it," the senator said.
That’s a fairly big defection. Baucus previously broke with the Democrats to push for Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts and the president’s version of Medicare reform, and his refusal to go along this time is a sign that Democrats might be ready to fight.
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11:12 AM
Bush's approval rating still slipping...
With the big inauguration less than two weeks away, an AP/Ipsos poll released today shows President Bush's approval rating dipping under 50 percent, the lowest of any re-elected president in 50 years. Meanwhile, 54 percent of respondents disapproved of Bush's management of the war in Iraq. That number could drop even further, as violence in Iraq is likely to increase in the run-up to the election.
Bush's low ratings should help strip the reality from his self-defined mandate and will further embolden counter-inaugural protesters while making it all the more difficult to discredit them. And the president can expect quite an opposition at his $40 million party in Washington, especially in a city that voted against him at a clip exceeding 90 percent.
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11:05 AM
Neocons on the rise?
Readers of this site who, like me, enjoy following all the bureaucratic minutiae in Washington, will recall that I'm no fan of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton. (Hey, like I said, minutiae.) The man, after all, seems largely responsible for the fact that we have no Iran policy, thanks to his misguided obsession with regime change in Tehran. Anyways, after recent rumors that Bolton would become the number two person at the State Department, under Condoleeza Rice, it seemed that all hopes of a moderate foreign policy—or a decent nonproliferation strategy—seemed lost forever.
But no. It now appears that Bolton is actually leaving the administration, and that number two slot will go to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. That's quite the shakeup! Over at the American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias is offering a fair and balanced overview of Zoellick, and regards the change as "mildly good news," a sign that the neocons are waning. Oddly enough, though, I don't feel quite so optimistic. Bolton, for all his massive warts, was still an old-fashioned realist who saw clearly the limits of American power. His ideas about regime change were misguided, but they weren't crazy, and he was responsible for one of the Bush administration's few successes on the arms control front—the Proliferation Security Initiative.
Now what about Zoellick? Because he was involved in implementing those silly steel tariffs right before the 2002 elections, people often wonder whether he's a mercantilist or a genuine free-trader. This debate misses the point, I think. The most relevant thing about Zoellick is that he seems to view international trade as a tool to strong-arm America's opponents and reward our allies. So, for instance, a year ago he called off U.S.-Egypt trade talks when Egypt refused to condemn Europe's ban on genetically modified foods. And his free-trade deals with Bahrain and Morocco made little economic sense as a whole, and mostly amounted to perks for supporters of the Iraq war. His regional trade deals, like CAFTA, focus more on establishing American trade dominance than in making the world a more well-connected and more interdependent place. If neoconservatism is premised on using our hard power to actively enforce and maintain American supremacy abroad, then Zoellick qualifies far more than Bolton ever did.
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10:58 AM
Reconsidering our aid priorities
On the still-continuing tsunami front, the Los Angeles Times reports today that many donor countries won't necessarily follow through on their pledges for aid and disaster relief. Indeed, trolling around on Google, this seems like a common occurrence—this report notes that only $17 million out of $32 million in pledges has gone to Bam, Iran, after last year's devastating earthquake. Some of those pledges, moreover, come with strings attached—Japan mandates that aid be used to buy Japanese goods; Australia mostly offers low-interest loans. It's not all generosity and roses here.
Even more importantly, though, one should note that many of this pledges come out of pre-existing aid budgets. The Washington Post worried yesterday that donor nations may have got caught up in the frenzy of tsunami news, and disbursed way too much aid to a bunch of countries that, when all is said and done, really won't collapse because of this tragedy. Other countries that may need that aid more, meanwhile, may lose out. We're likely, for example, to see a lot less aid go to preventive measures, where it could do a lot of good. In 2002, Mozambique anticipated major flooding and asked for $2.7 million in aid to prepare. They didn't get it, and the international community only responded only after the fact, putting up $550 million in emergency assistance, rehabilitation, reconstruction, etc.
At any rate, I'm not going to pretend to know the exact dollar amount that Indonesia and Sri Lanka should receive. But there's a very irrational and messy process at work here, and it would be heartening to see a more effective aid strategy emerge from this tragedy.
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4:03 PM
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?
As Walter Shapiro points out in today’s Los Angeles Times, the race to replace Terry McAuliffe as head of the DNC has seen plenty of candidates working to distance themselves from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party":
South Carolina strategist Donnie Fowler, who briefly headed Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, tried to transcend the party's God gap when he boasted, "I am a Democrat because I am a Christian, not in spite of it." (Memo to Fowler: Don't repeat this line at a Barbra Streisand fundraiser). Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, who lost a 2002 Texas Senate race, declared, "I know the frustration you feel to be burdened by a national party that you have to run from." Statements like these suggest that the fetal crouch has become the Democrats' natural position. It is safe, comfortable and ever so familiar. Since the 1972 McGovern rout, the Democrats have gone through similar the-end-is-nigh rituals, in 1980, 1984 and 1994. That doesn't count 1988 and 2000, when the party devoted its postelection energy to flagellating its presidential nominee.
The "safe, comfortable" route is apparently so appealing that some Democratic leaders are pushing for McAuliffe to stay. McAuliffe wouldn’t say if he’s interested, and he’s previously expressed reluctance to continue past the end of his term. Still, the party’s inability to oust George Bush despite the war in Iraq and the stumbling economy shows something clearly isn’t working. If the party wants to build its base, it’s probably best to put some new blood into the leadership.
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2:04 PM
A certified protest
By now, the myriad voting problems in Ohio are well-documented. So when it came time for Congress to certify the election results today, Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and Sen. Barbara Boxer teamed up to formally protest Ohio’s total.
"If [voters] were willing to stand in polls for countless hours in the rain, as many did in Ohio, than I can surely stand up for them here in the halls of Congress," Tubbs Jones said.
By law, the protest forced both houses into special sessions to debate the Ohio vote. Not surprisingly, certification easily passed both GOP-controlled houses, with Boxer the only "nay" in the Senate (some other Democrats skipped the vote). But as Boxer explained, the move was designed to keep voting reform on the national radar, and there’s no time like the present to push for it:
"Our people are dying all over the world ... to bring democracy to the far corners of the world. Let's fix it here."
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12:38 PM
An AG confirmation of global significance
The opening of the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings signals a shift away from the traditional AG battle over domestic issues to one based squarely on international law. Never before has a candidate for the position faced opposition from so many high-ranking military officers (mostly Republicans); and their challenge, more than objections from the likes of Chuck Schumer, could potentially derail what a week ago (or even two days ago) seemed like a slam-dunk. As Bruce Shapiro writes in The Nation, the Bush administration has been somewhat blindsided as the hearings commence, and it will be interesting to see if acquiescent Democrats (like Schumer) actually fight the Gonzales nomination:
"It says something that the most vigorous opposition to Alberto Gonzales's nomination for US Attorney General emanates from recently retired military officers, not the civil rights lobby. It also says something that even as the White House, through a new Justice Department memo, sought to defuse Gonzales's record as the legal godfather of Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, word leaked of an emerging Administration plan for lifetime internment of terror suspects, without trial, in a worldwide network of US-built prisons. This is the first Attorney General nomination of global consequence, a dimension to which Washington only slowly awakened as Gonzales headed into his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee."
Unfortunately, you can expect Gonzales to be confirmed given Democratic weakness in the Senate. And yet, once again the Bush administration fails to acknowledge the global significance of its actions. Sure, they won the election and they'll win this confirmation; but they still do not realize that the domestic contests are really exhibition games. Given the abhorrent torture of Abu Ghraib along with Gonzales and Bush's casual dismissal of longstanding Geneva conventions, this appointment further magnifies that they are losing the international contest. Americans, as Mark Danner argues in an excellent piece on torture and the confirmation, "are generally content to take the president at his word." However, large numbers of people in every other country in the world are not prepared to give Bush that kind of a pass. Until the president understands that, he will continue to appear as the victor at home while failing miserably abroad.
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11:48 AM
Will GOP infighting doom privatization?
I'm not sure I'd put too much stock in this New York Times story claiming "G.O.P. Divided as Bush Views Social Security." Basically, the president wants to phase out Social Security by slashing benefits and borrowing money for small private accounts. A bunch of lunatic Republicans, meanwhile—led by Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)—want workers to divert all of their payroll tax payments into private accounts, and then borrow a whole heap of money to cover the gap. Supposedly it's a big feud.
But really, this doesn't seem like an unbridgeable divide. If conservatives want a bold way to phase out Social Security, all they need to do is get some form of privatization passed, and let it act as a Trojan Horse. Let's say, for instance, that Bush's proposal passes, and workers can only divert at most $1000 a year into their private accounts. Pretty soon high-earners will put political pressure on Congress to raise the cap. The Heritage Foundation and the National Review and various talking heads on Fox will start yapping about how the cap is unfair and artificial. So voila, the cap gets raised, bit by bit. More money gets diverted. Another funding crisis ensues. Down the line, benefits need to get cut further. And so on. From small private accounts we quickly get the complete and utter destruction of the program.
I don't doubt that most Republicans know this. This was, after all, the logic of the Bush tax cuts. At the time, the same radical conservatives bashed some of those cuts for being too meek and small. But groups like the Club for Growth eventually reconciled themselves to smaller cuts, noting, "It is not the size of the tax cut which matters, but what happens with tax rates and incentives." And now, two years later, they can start pushing to make those cuts even bigger, and permanent to boot. So when Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth says that a small privatization effort will cause "the enthusiasm among a lot of conservatives [to] wane," I don't buy it. The radicals always sign on in the end.
No, the real problem for conservatives, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, is that many Republicans are too scared to touch Social Security without Democratic support. So as Josh Marshall has noted—and not just noted, but made an obsession over—Democrats simply must not give the majority party even the thinnest of covers.
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11:02 AM
...and the stupidity of memos present!
For those who haven't seen it yet, Josh Marshall has uncovered a secret GOP memo about the strategy to destroy Social Security. No surprise there. Anyways, since even the GOP seems confused about Social Security facts, let's straighten them out, shall we?
Here's a startling fact: under current law, an average retiree in 2050 would be scheduled to receive close to 40 percent more (in real terms) in benefits than an average retiree today -- and yet there are no mechanisms in place to produce the revenue to pay out those benefits. No one on this planet can tell you why a 25-year-old person today is entitled to a 40 percent increase in Social Security benefits (in real terms) compared to what a person retiring today receives. [Emphasis in original]
Um, I can tell you why seniors of the future are entitled to more benefits. Because the United States is going to grow richer and more prosperous as a nation, its standards of living will rise, and seniors are entitled to share in America's prosperity. The seniors of the future will have spent most of their lives working hard to make America a better and more prosperous place. The least we can do is ensure that they don't fall into poverty—or suffer sharp income drop-offs, or fall prey to stock market swings—the moment they can no longer work.
Also, it's true that if we do nothing to Social Security, and the economy sucks as much as the Trustees assume it will, then no, we won't have enough money to pay for benefits that are 40 percent higher (in real terms) than we pay today. According to the Congressional Budget Office, we'll only have enough money to pay benefits that are… oh, about 22 percent higher than they are today. That's your big crisis.
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10:40 AM
The ghost of memos past
Not to pile on Alberto Gonzales, but…
At this very moment, the attorney general nominee is fielding questions from Senate Democrats about exactly how quaint he really finds the Geneva Convention. But as Salon’s Alan Berlow explains today Gonzales’ lack of moral judgment goes back to his days as George Bush’s counsel in Texas:
In addition to questioning Gonzales about when he thinks it's appropriate to torture people, Judiciary Committee members might want to ask Gonzales when he thinks it's appropriate to kill them. A sizable body of evidence on that subject has been extracted from the Texas State Archives, the repository of the gubernatorial records of George W. Bush, and these documents suggest that Gonzales didn't give the subject the kind of thought one might expect of a man burdened with a mantle of moral values. As governor of Texas, Bush acted as the court of last resort for 153 men and women, the last public official standing between them and the executioner. On 152 occasions Bush opted for death, and for 57 of those decisions he relied almost exclusively on briefings prepared by Gonzales -- briefings that appear to have been designed, above all, to facilitate the governor's predisposition for execution.
Berlow details a number of specific cases where Gonzales’ briefings left out inconvenient details, from an attorney sleeping through a trial to how one case prompted Justice Harry Blackmun’s famous change-of-heart on the death penalty. The entire list is worth a read, and raises more questions about Gonzales’ willingness to tell Bush what he wants to hear instead of an objective analysis of the facts. Perhaps Sen. Joe Biden put it best during today’s hearings:
"This is not about your intelligence, this hearing is not about your competence, it's not about your integrity -- it's about your judgment and your candor. We're looking for candor, old buddy. I love you, but you're not very candid so far."
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10:13 AM
"The first thing we do, let's rob all the seniors."
Via DailyKos, I see Republicans are gearing up to make the Social Security phase-out part of the War on Terror. Here's Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK):
"[President Bush] cannot afford to fail. It would have repercussions for the rest of his program, including foreign policy. We can't hand the president a defeat on his major domestic initiative at a time of war." (Wall Street Journal, 1/6/04)
Actually, I think the war effort might be improved if Bush's self-confidence took a bit of a hit…
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10:10 AM
Is torture all Clinton's fault?
It's an all-out defense of Alberto Gonzales over at National Review today. Michael Ledeen kicks off the fun with two big arguments. First is his contention that the practice of "rendition"—turning terrorists over to friendly (and less-than-democratic) governments for interrogation—actually began under Bill Clinton, so the Democrats complaining now are just a bunch of big hypocrites.
In a sense, Ledeen's absolutely right. Read this old Wall Street Journal story about the Tirana cell in Albania for an in-depth account. It was inexcusable. On the other hand, it's clear that rendition has progressed even further since then. The Tirana cell had been tracked for some time, and the government had gathered a lot of evidence that its members had connections with al-Qaeda. Nowadays, by contrast, Canadian citizens who seem a bit swarthy get deported to Syria for torture sessions, and scores of innocent Iraqis get held at Abu Ghraib. It's completely out of control. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration, at the very least, "pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations." I don't want to defend any of this, and the Clinton-era practices deserve harsh condemnation, but the torture policies going on today aren't just a natural outgrowth. The Bush administration—and Alberto Gonzales—have taken it to a whole new level, and regardless of who started it, it must stop.
Later on in the piece, Ledeen bemoans the lack of actual debate surrounding torture:
As usual in the many congressional debates about the war in which we are engaged, the central issues will not be raised at all. Does anyone know which interrogation methods, if any, have proven effective over the past three-plus years? Isn't that worth knowing?
Fine. I'm all for having this debate. But let's do it in public. Bring in experts and doctors and interrogators to testify. Take opinion polls. Let's argue about the morality of torture—but let's just do it in the open. For the last three years, Gonzales and the Bush administration have decided to have this debate behind closed doors, without a shred congressional oversight or public discussion.
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5:48 PM
Another Aussie alleges abuse
Last month, this website noted the abuse allegations made in an affidavit by David Hicks, an Australian national held at Guantanamo Bay as an "enemy combatant." That story didn’t get much play in the American press, but history is now repeating itself, with allegations of abuse from Australia’s other detainee. As AFP Sydney reports:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said it had obtained previously sealed court documents detailing [Mamdouh] Habib's claims of torture while in custody in Egypt before his move to Cuba.According to the papers, Habib alleged his captors filled his room with water, until it was just below his chin, forcing him to stand on tiptoe for hours.
Habib also alleged he was suspended from hooks on the wall of his cell with his feet resting on a large drum, into which an electric current flowed from wires apparently attached to a battery.
If he did not give the answer his captors wanted they threw a switch and a jolt of electricity would run through the drum, forcing him to dance on it, Habib alleged in the documents, according to the ABC.
Both Hicks and Habib are among the 15 detainees allowed by the Bush administration to appear before a U.S. military tribunal, part of a political favor to Aussie PM John Howard. Why the American press isn’t reporting on these allegations remains a mystery.
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3:04 PM
Taking a look at Plan B
In the September/October issue of Mother Jones, Chris Mooney reported on how the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee worked to block the over-the-counter sale of the Plan B morning-after pill. As the article noted:
Religious groups like the Concerned Women for America and conservative members of Congress also weighed in against allowing OTC sale of Plan B, maintaining that access to the pill might cause young girls to be more promiscuous.
At the time, of course, there was no evidence of that actually happening. And as Wednesday’s Washington Post reports, a new University of California study found that access to Plan B did not lead to women engaging in more risky sexual behavior:
The study did find that women given a supply to keep at home were more than 1 1/2 times as likely to use the drug after unprotected sex as those who had to pick it up at a clinic or pharmacy. The findings led the study authors to conclude that easy access to Plan B, also called the morning-after pill, could reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies while posing no apparent risk to women.The study contradicts a key claim made by opponents of easier access to Plan B at a time when the Food and Drug Administration is preparing to decide on a second application to allow nonprescription sales of the drug.
Once again, as this study shows, decisions that should be made on the basis of science are following the wrong criteria.
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2:29 PM
Abbas v. Hamas
As noted yesterday, the relative calm between Palestinian pragmatists and militants has been repeatedly broken this week as the election approaches. On Wednesday, the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat finally condemned the tactics of Hamas, which has launched rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli targets this week:
"Israel is carrying out acts of massacre and crimes based on various excuses, among them the armed struggle by the Palestinian organizations in the Al-Aqsa Intifada," the announcement read…The committee also said that Abbas' expressed opposition to the Qassam rocket and mortar fire is based on his desire to withhold from Israel a pretext for military operations. According to the announcement, Abbas "did not wish to gain votes by means of his declarations, but rather to serve the Palestinian national interest and to bring about international pressure on Israel to end the occupation."
That sentiment’s an improvement over Abbas’ pretty inciting comments yesterday, which the State Department called, "disturbing" and "inappropriate when working to improve relations between Palestinians and Israelis." Fatah obviously has political reasons to distance itself from Hamas' actions, but the move is both good politics and good policy.
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12:48 PM
Ethics fallout for the GOP
As chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) played the GOP House’s lead voice of reason this week. He worked to kill the "Tom DeLay rule" and vowed to fight proposed changes that would prevent ethics investigations if the committee splits on partisan lines. What does Hefley expect for his efforts?
"I expect to be booted," he told the Boston Globe.
Yep. Speaker Dennis Hastert reportedly plans to replace Hefley (Hastert cites term limits as the reason, but Hefley sees an agenda in the speaker’s reading of House rules).
Rep. Barney Frank called the ethics infighting among the GOP "the first breach in the wall" between moderates and the DeLay faction (or at least, the first to actually show itself on the floor of the new Congress). Moderate GOP Rep. Christopher Shays probably put it best:
"It's very sad. "I think we've lost our minds. The power has gotten into our heads in a way that we're not thinking clearly."
He’s right. Whether a Democrat or Republican faces ethics charges, it’s in the public interest to investigate legitimate claims. As some in the GOP have noted, they won't control Congress forever, and you know what they say about payback...
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12:27 PM
A failure of oversight
Via Cursor.org, I see Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has been accusing the Food and Drug Administration of using taxpayer money to "defend drug companies who are being sued in state courts." Not only that, but it seems that prior to his resignation, the FDA's former chief counsel, Daniel Troy, had been asking drug industry's top lawyers to let him know about cases in which the FDA can intervene.
A little background. Daniel Troy was the first political appointee to the FDA's chief counsel position—previously the post was held by career civil servants. Troy, incidentally, represented pharmaceutical and tobacco industries before President Bush appointed him to the FDA. He resigned in late November after coming under fire for these sorts of conflicts of interest.
At any rate, all this inspired me to look up the Office of Government Ethic's exact rules and guidelines on conflicts of interest. Here's the OGE's summary of the relevant statute:
Specifically, this law says that you may not work on an assignment that you know will affect your own financial interests or the financial interests of your spouse or your minor child. The prohibition also applies if you know the assignment will affect the financial interests of your general partner, or of an organization that you serve as an officer, director, employee, general partner, or trustee. And it even applies when you know the matter will affect the financial interests of someone with whom you have an arrangement for employment, or with whom you are negotiating for employment.
Strictly speaking, none of these situations applied to Troy, but anyone could see that there was a problem. The same goes for reconstruction in Iraq—many of the key oversight positions were filled by individuals with ties to the very industries and companies they were supposed to oversee. Ditto for environmental positions, where former industry lobbyists are encouraged to move to regulatory positions. Blame goes to the administration responsible, of course, but it's also time to update those rules and guidelines.
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11:54 AM
Administration moves on landmines (kind of)
As MotherJones.com has previously explained, the United States remains the key holdout against the international ban on landmines. By making the presence of mines in the Korean DMZ non-negotiable, the U.S. remains absent from the now-150 signatory nations.
To the administration’s credit, however, it took a step in the right direction on Wednesday, agreeing to ban those mines which can’t be found by metal detectors.
The U.S. hasn’t deployed any new landmines since the 1991 Gulf War, and has pledged to stop using most anti-personnel mines in the next six years (with the exception of controversial, self-destructing "smart mines"). As Sen. Patrick Leahy told the Associated Press on Wednesday, that "no country, including ours, should continue using land mines, which indiscriminately kill or main thousands of innocent people every year, including our own troops." He also called the administration’s plan a "positive step, but a small one." That’s a pretty good summation.
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10:57 AM
More criticism for Rummy
A year ago, Donald Rumsfeld tasked the Defense Science Board to study the mistakes the military made in trying to secure the peace in Iraq. The board, which serves under Rumsfeld, turned in its report Monday and, as the Boston Globe reports, the board didn’t feel too bad about criticizing the boss:
In addition to calling for better planning within the military for postwar operations, the report, now being circulated among top Pentagon brass, calls for dramatically greater involvement by the State Department, whose planning for the aftermath of the Iraq war was largely ignored by Rumsfeld and his senior aides.''The Department of State will need substantially more resources, both people and funds, to fulfill its proper role in stabilization and reconstruction operations," the report states, saying that State Department diplomats can help rebuild civic institutions and win over local populations in ways the military cannot.
It also says nation-building efforts depend upon a ''stronger partnership and working relationship" between Defense and State, which have had a rocky interaction while headed by Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
The report also comes out in favor of the bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Biden and Richard Lugar (and, needless to say, not supported by Rummy) that would create a State Department office to handle nation building.
In short, even the military and foreign-policy experts commissioned by the DoD have joined the chorus calling for more Powell, less Rumsfeld.
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10:15 AM
Poor Counsel
Tomorrow the Senate is expected to confirm Alberto "The Geneva Conventions are quaint!" Gonzales as Attorney General. All this despite the fact that, as today's New York Times reports, Gonzales went out of his way to obtain the 2002 "Bybee memo" that allowed extreme interrogation measures. (Remember folks, if there's no organ failure, it probably wasn't torture!) On other matters—like the rulings on indefinite detainees—it seems that Gonzales just sat back and let the vice-president's legal counsel take charge. So Gonzales either aggressively sought out his preferred policies on torture or simply "acquiesced in policymaking." At no point, apparently, did he do what a White House counsel should have been doing—advising the president on whether political policies remained within the law.
So, anything to say in his defense? In the Wall Street Journal today another former White House counsel, Douglas Kmiec, claims Gonzales has learned from his mistakes. Nice try, but unconvincing. It's true that Gonzales recently wrote yet another ruling that repudiated the 2002 torture memo. But even that memo stays silent on whether a) the president can override anti-torture laws, and b) the U.S. has any obligations "to refrain from 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'.") So even now, in his repentant stage, Gonzales sees the law as a means to achieving specific policies, rather than something that needs to be upheld for its own sake. Does that qualify him to be chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America? No. Not at all.
As Andrew Sullivan nicely points out, this isn't a partisan issue. This is not an "anti-Bush political issue." It's about the rule of law, and standards of human decency, and all those other things we're told America is supposed to symbolize.
One final, tactical note. Over at TAPPED, Jeff Dubner suggests that, in the hearings tomorrow, Democrats should focus on the Bernard Kerik nomination to beat up Gonzales. After all, Gonzales looked at a man with extensive mob ties, possible bribery-related scandals, various abuses of power—and decided that, yes, Kerik was the perfect person to defend the homeland. Jeff's suggestion is, indeed, brilliant. Gonzales has a lot of more important failings, but the Kerik affair seems to generate the biggest media frenzy, and it does speak to Gonzales general disregard for the rule of law. So why not bring it up?
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4:44 PM
The down-ballot fundraising picture
Most reports on campaign fundraising look at the presidential race, for obvious reasons. But congressional races also saw record money this year, and on Monday the FEC released funding totals for the Senate and House races.
According to the FEC, Senate candidates raised $371.6 million in this election, (a 32 percent increase from 2002) while House candidates raised $613.8 million (up 14 percent) -- a combined $985 million. The FEC site has a pretty comprehensive breakdown.
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3:28 PM
Church + state = $
Back in the 2000 campaign, George Bush made federal funding of "faith-based" charities a key part of his "compassionate conservative" pitch. On Tuesday, the Washington Post looked at how much money these charities are now receiving -- and how the administration pushes states to dole out even more:
Partly as a result, in 2003, groups dubbed "faith-based" received $1.17 billion in grants from federal agencies, according to documents provided by the White House to the Associated Press. That was about 8 percent of the $14.5 billion spent on social programs that qualify for faith-based grants in five federal departments.That's not enough, said H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. An additional $40 billion in federal money is given out by state governments, he said, and many states do not realize that federal rules now allow them to fund these organizations.
But there’s a difference between states that want to grant the money but don’t know they can, and those that are compelled to do so. The Post cites an example of a city council in Wisconsin that opposed giving the Salvation Army a grant to buy a homeless shelter because said shelter would also host church services (not to mention a history of active hiring discrimination by the organization). The White House then told the council that new federal regulations allowed the move.
While giving federal money to religious groups at all still seems unconstitutional, Towey says he’ll push to make sure these groups aren’t "discriminated against" by states -- even if the churches behind some charities practice far more serious discrimination. As Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State said:
"There clearly is a wave of new faith-based offices coming to states around the country, and I think some of them are likely to deal with it responsibly and others to deal with it as irresponsibly as the administration does."
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2:09 PM
More Alberto Gonzales-bashing!
As the Washington Post and others are reporting today, a dozen retired military officers have sent in a signed letter to the Senate opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonazales (of "torture memo" fame) for Attorney General. Now, via Justin Logan, here's the actual letter—and it's a good one:
Mr. Gonzales' reasoning [regarding torture] was also on the wrong side of history. Repeatedly in our past, the United States has confronted foes that, at the time they emerged, posed threats of a scope or nature unlike any we had previously faced. But we have been far more steadfast in the past in keeping faith with our national commitment to the rule of law.
During the Second World War, General Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that the allies adhered to the law of war in their treatment of prisoners because "the Germans had some thousands of American and British prisoners and I did not want to give Hitler the excuse or justification for treating our prisoners more harshly than he already was doing." In Vietnam, U.S. policy required that the Geneva Conventions be observed for all enemy prisoners of war – both North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong – even though the Viet Cong denied our own prisoners of war the same protections. And in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States afforded Geneva Convention protections to more than 86,000 Iraqi prisoners of war held in U.S. custody. The threats we face today – while grave and complex – no more warrant abandoning these basic principles than did the threats of enemies past.
Right on. See also this Reason piece on "indefinite detentions" for more libertarian outrage over the president's torture/detainee policies. Julian Sanchez wonders why terrorists should be held to a different standard than everyday murderers. I've wondered that too. We have a president who believes, apparently, that hate crimes should not receive special recognition, because "all crimes are hate crimes." Why, then, don't we just treat terrorism like any other crime too? Hm?
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2:06 PM
Before his time?
The National Review is apparently ready to come out and endorse John Kerry's campaign proposal to make teachers more accountable while increasing their pay. Oh, and in other news, Kerry's old critique of Bush's Social Security plan—which was savaged by the media at the time—has proved absolutely correct. Oh well. The man did look funny in a windsurfing suit, so how great could he really be?
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12:46 PM
Violence ahead of the Palestinian vote
The historic Palestinian election to decide Yasser Arafat’s replacement takes place in just five days. And while stepped-up violence in Gaza has been understandably low on world news radar this week, it’s rebuilding tensions in the leadup to the election.
Gaza militants have increased mortar and rocket attacks against Israeli settlements in recent days, with reports of rival militant groups trying to grab power as Israel plans to withdraw from those territories. The Israeli government warned that the military would retaliate if these attacks against settlers continued, and it did Tuesday, with tank shells killing seven people.
The deaths of civilians are tragic, as is the practice of militants essentially using civilians as cover. But the controversy over who is to blame is already giving way to controversy over the response from Mahmoud Abbas. The frontrunner in Sunday’s election, and the most moderate of the major candidates, Abbas called Israel a "Zionist enemy" Tuesday. In turn, two Israeli Cabinet members broke with state policy by criticizing Abbas:
"Without a doubt, what Abu Mazen said was intolerable and unacceptable, and it cannot serve as a basis for any future cooperation," said Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
During his four-day campaign trip to Gaza -- where militant groups like Hamas dominate local politics – Abbas has begun using hard-line rhetoric, such as calling the "right of return" mandatory and declining to criticize terrorist groups. Some commentators have seen Abbas’ Tuesday comments as part of a temporary political move to gain hard-line support, but Israel’s foreign minister said his government "cannot accept the argument that Abbas' statements stem from campaigning motives."
Abbas probably remains the best hope for a true partner in peace among the Palestinian candidates, and Israel is still allowing him extra leeway (for example, he’s still the only candidate allowed to campaign in Jerusalem). But the danger of courting militants is becoming beholden to them later. Hopefully, Abbas' electoral victory won't come at the expense of a meaningful two-state solution negotiated in good faith on both sides.
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11:53 AM
Progress on nuclear proliferation?
Lawrence Korb has a must-read op-ed in the Boston Globe about how the Bush administration has not done enough to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. In sum, the administration has done some positive things, and some negative things—particularly by undermining a number of arms control treaties—that sort of belie the seriousness of the threat.
Are these half-measures enough? It's hard to say. Some analysts say it would be very, very difficult for any terrorist group to get its hands on a working nuke, while still others think that possibility very likely. From a non-technical standpoint, the "very, very difficult" crowd seems to have the better argument here, but there's also no reason to think that will always be the case. So now seems like a good time to start locking up loose fissile material and cleaning up old Soviet nuclear sites.
Meanwhile, there's the whole issue of hostile states acquiring nuclear weapons. We still don't know the identity of the mysterious "other country" that bought nuclear technology from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program. Meanwhile, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has proved horribly ineffective of late—it has no mechanism to punish rogue states, and it allows countries like Iran and North Korea to develop "peaceful" nuclear programs that can then be quickly converted for weapons use. Administration officials have cited this fact as an excuse to abandon diplomacy altogether, though the correct response of course would be to revamp the treaty and get serious about proliferation.
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10:59 AM
How voluntary are these accounts, anyways?
Here's a question. As plans for phasing out Social Security get further and further along, is the president going to make private accounts mandatory? After all, even without knowing that they would receive smaller benefits under Bush's "reform" than under the plan that's supposedly in "crisis", even without knowing any of that, over 62 percent of Americans say they wouldn't choose private accounts for themselves.
So what happens to all these people? Forcing them to do something they don't want to do seems like a surefire way to kill any popular support for the plan. But if these people don't get private accounts, then they won't have any way to make up (partially) the reduction in benefits that Bush is proposing. I guess Bush could always allow the vast majority of Americans to remain in the current system, but that's not much of a reform, is it?
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10:55 AM
More DeLay
Just to add to Jeff's post below, Tom DeLay may still take other steps to ensure that those finance investigations don't get too far. A few days ago, the New York Times reported that his buddies in Texas may already be taking care of the problem:
In Texas, state Republican legislative leaders and party officials are considering some maneuvers of their own in light of the investigation. One proposal would take authority for prosecuting the campaign finance case away from the Democratic district attorney in Austin and give it to the state attorney general, a Republican. Another possible move would legalize corporate campaign contributions like those that figure into the state case.
So the whole thing is very unethical, but at least it's not blatantly unethical anymore—the House is no longer voting in favor of fixing parking tickets!—so maybe somehow that makes it okay….
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10:43 AM
The House flip-flops on DeLay
Back in November, House Republicans passed a rules change to protect their ethically challenged majority leader, Tom DeLay, from having to temporarily step down if he’s indicted back in Texas. Late Monday night, the GOP reversed itself in a closed-door meeting on the eve of the new congressional session.
"It allows the Republicans to focus on the issues, the agenda that is before us and not to have Tom DeLay be the issue," Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn) told the New York Times. "I feel like we have just taken a shower."
But while good-government types are rightfully pleased about the end of this proposed change, the House GOP leadership still plans to push through a troubling rules change that would require the agreement of a majority of the ethics committee to pursue an ethics investigation against a House member. Because the ethics committee is evenly divided, that’s a sure recipe for partisans on either side of the aisle impeding investigations against their own, and for the ethics committee to become truly toothless. The opposition has some more opposing to do.
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10:31 AM
High-school students: Are you right for the military? Sure!
As if high school students did not have enough aptitude testing,a new test conducted by the military "suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits" for the armed forces. The Defense Department is taking heat for administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam during class time, and many students and parents say they were unaware that the test was non-compulsory. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools that receive federal funding are required to provide military recruiters with students' names, addresses and phone numbers and schools must allow recruiters access to campus. The military's aptitude test is not part of the No Child Left Behind requirement yet, according to the Department of Defense, 722,450 students took the test during the past school year.
There are two problems with the military testing. First, the military is deeply embedded in the public school system, and unsuspecting teenagers -- many with limited alternatives -- are forced by difficult circumstances into considering the armed forces. Students who are required by law to attend school should not be subjected to further testing by a military that exploits young people in its search for new recruits. Second, the test is premised on the questionable notion that "aptitude exams" can dictate what sixteen year-olds should be doing with their lives. One student questioned about the test said she "was interested in anything that could help her decide what path to pursue." The military's push into junior highs and high schools for recruits is an obvious and disturbing deprivation of innocence and youth, but it is also a shame that kids and their teachers still rely on military (and other) aptitude tests to determine an individuals future path in life. With college students already organizing to ban military recruiters based on the armed forces' discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy, let's hope that the next wave of student protest challenges these tests and the military's relentless pursuit of youth.
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9:42 AM
Social Security details emerge
At long last, the first details of President Bush's Social Security phase-out have started to emerge. The Washington Post reports that any reform will cut benefits "by nearly a third" by indexing them to inflation, rather than wages. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities rightly bashes this idea: whereas benefits currently amount to around 40 percent of pre-retirement wages, under Bush's plan they would eventually drop to about 20 percent.
Of course, for people who mistakenly believe that Social Security will go bankrupt anyways and pay nothing, this doesn't seem so bad. As White House spokesman Trent Duffy notes, the cut in benefits needs to be compared to those benefit levels that are possible under the current system. So okay. Fortunately, economist Max Sawicky did just that, calculating that even if we did nothing to shore up the current system, and had to scale back benefits if and when Social Security started running a deficit, payouts would still be higher than they would be under Bush's proposed "reform". Again, the system in "crisis" pays far more than the reform.
We should also ask whether the returns on private accounts would make up for the reductions in benefits. Again, not likely. A few weeks ago in the New York Times, Jeff Madrick posed this very question:
We can compute how retirees fare if they earned the historical average of 4.6 percent a year (after transaction costs) on a portfolio of stocks and bonds. William Dudley, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, has calculated that benefits for a typical retired one-earner family would come to about 93 percent of the projected benefits from the present Social Security system in 2022. In 2075, the benefits would fall to only 77 percent of present-system benefits.So if an investor does very well, in historical terms, he or she would still end up with less than under the current system. Now what if the investor doesn't do so well?
If a worker earns just the respectable expected bond rate of 3 percent a year, or 2.7 percent after transactions costs, then the typical one-earner family will retire on only about 58 percent of the projected benefits under current law. If the investor earns zero over time, which may well occur for some investors, the projected retirement benefit is only a little more than 38 percent of the current benefit. These are considerably worse than the projected adjustments needed to bring the present system into balance.
So to recap. The president is proposing that we a) ignore massive and immediate problems with the federal deficit and health care spending, b) monkey with a program that might—might—face a slight crisis 50 years from now, and c) monkey with it in such a way that many people will end up receiving smaller benefits. No, really, this is all brilliant, keep the details coming.
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5:04 PM
'Law and order' party
House Republicans heart sleazy sex, bribes, and unpaid parking tickets. See Atrios for details. The whole thing is very sordid and disgusting, but I want to call attention to the fact that roughly a third of all Americans still don't know which party controls the government. This week seems like a good time for them to learn, no?
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2:26 PM
Few Florida provisional ballots count
One of the most important concepts in the 2002 Help America Vote Act was the creation of provisional ballots, which were viewed as a potential solution to the kind of disfranchisement seen in Florida during the 2000 election. On Monday, the Talahassee Democrat examined county-by-county records, and determined that two out of every three provisional ballots cast in Florida on Nov. 2 were tossed out by election supervisors.
The paper found 7.2 percent of provisional ballots were discarded because the voters had been purged from the voter rolls. While the purging of former felons drew much of the 2000 coverage, Florida also purges any voter who didn’t participate in the last two federal elections. Another 11 percent were tossed out because voters cast ballots in the wrong precinct. As previously noted, union groups and other activists had pushed for voters to cast ballots anywhere in the county where they registered, citing hurricane damage to polling places among the reasons. The Florida Supreme Court decided against those efforts. The majority of discarded ballots came from unregistered voters.
The good news is about one-third of voters who otherwise would have been disfranchised were able to vote because of the provisional ballot. But the problems highlighted above again demonstrate the need for more reform in Florida, and the value of ideas like same-day registration. As Reggie Mitchell of Election Protection of Florida told the Democrat:
"That's not a viable solution to just discard thousands of votes of people trying to exercise their civic duty. They're showing up and actually trying to vote at a polling place, and by some technicality, their vote gets thrown out."
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1:40 PM
When "never again" rings hollow
Journalist Michael Kavanagh reminds us of something we've probably all long forgotten about: genocide in the Congo. The summary is grim: "31,000 conflict-related deaths each month, tens of thousands of displaced people, and no solution on the horizon."
There was a lot of hand-wringing going on after the international community stood idly by during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, but all these cries of "never again" don't do much good if it all, in fact, happens again. The Congo, Sudan, anywhere. And yes, the scandal over the Congo peacekeepers who set up a prostitution ring is indeed horrific, and a good excuse for beating up on the UN, but it doesn't get at the problem of how to stop the massive amounts of killing going on right now. Something different is needed. This old essay by Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter discusses some ways in which the international community can refocus its priorities on preventing these sorts of catastrophes. So, you know, while top officials are having super-secret meetings to discuss the UN's "image problem", they might want to give it a look.
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12:01 PM
Tsunamis and 'stinginess'
The Bush administration deserves applause for tapping two former presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to lead a fundraising drive for the tsunami disaster in South Asia. Both former presidents are very good at this sort of thing, and it will ensure that the relief effort doesn't get bogged down in partisan bickering.
On that front, though, I see that plenty of conservatives have been getting up in arms over remarks by a UN official, Jan Egeland, that Western nations are too "stingy". (Contrary to what's been reported, Egeland did not single out the United States here.) On one level, yes, the remarks were a bit unfair—having worked in a flood observatory during college, I can say that pledges for disaster aid always come slowly, as the full scope of the tragedy becomes clear. But that said, these outside criticism and rebukes are also almost always necessary as a way to pressure Western countries into giving more. If they get results—and they sure seem to be—then who cares whether they're unfair? As Dan Drezner details, even if you factor in all the private-giving, the United States is still not the most generous country around, and we could certainly use a kick in the pants to do more.
(By the way, for those who missed it, please do check out our list of relief organizations further down on this page.)
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10:47 AM
Good-bye FOIA
Eric Umansky has a great article in Slate about how the Bush administration has stonewalled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by journalists. We reported (very briefly) on this a while back, and it seems that the White House long ago instructed all its agencies to withhold anything they might deem "sensitive" -- an extremely broad and vague category. And it's not just torture memos that are being withheld, but all sorts of documents pertaining to health care, the economy, and agriculture. We've long since passed "reasons of national security" here, and are now dealing with secrecy for its own sake.
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10:35 AM
Back in Iraq
If you missed it over the holidays, be sure to check out Christopher Albritton's firsthand report on Iraq over at his weblog. The good news is that a lot of Iraqis are excited to vote in January. The ugly news is that a lot of Sunnis aren't planning to vote, and will probably keep blowing stuff up so long as democracy offers them nothing more than permanent minority status. (Yes, as some commentators like to point out, it's hard to feel sorry for these people, many of whom supported Saddam Hussein. But I'm not interested in morality here. I'm interested in getting people involved in politics so that they stop blowing up American soldiers.)
Albritton also notes that interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite, has a lot of support and may be competitive against the more fundamentalist lists. I'm not sure that's right. One thing I have noted before, though, is that much of Allawi's support will come from absentee ballots, which will be counted in Jordan—whose king loves Allawi and fears the pro-Iranian Shiites. If Allawi does better than expected, things could get ugly. In America, when people in close elections suddenly "find" absentee ballots lying around somewhere, accusations fly back and forth, but people don't start killing each other. An Iraqi election dispute might not be nearly as friendly, to say the least.
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10:16 AM
None dare call it radical
It's a new year, yes, but the same old radicals are still in the White House. A few days ago, the Bush administration announced that it was putting drastic tax reform aside in favor of something called "Option 5," an "incremental" tax reform. Nothing radical to see here folks, we're all just going to go nice and incremental! Sure. As economist Nouriel Roubini points out, "Option 5" is still more of the same old outlandish tax cuts—eliminating taxation on capital income, reducing corporate taxes further, reducing the Alternative Minimum Tax, perhaps taxing health and Social Security benefits of middle-income families. So what's progressive about all this? "Little or nothing," says Roubini.
Meanwhile