Putting ideology and partisanship ahead of country

By voting en masse last week against the stimulus package in the House of Representatives, House Republicans have put ideology and partisanship ahead of country. The United States, as well as most of the world, is facing a very severe economic crisis that is rapidly becoming worse. The House Republicans not only have no alternative to the stimulus package other than propose more tax cuts for their favored constituents. They act as if the repudiation of the Republican Party’s leadership did not occur in the election of 2008. Yet, the House Republican leadership is wearing the same ideological blinders that were in large part responsible for their shrinkage in numbers over the past two elections. Their response to the economic crisis is to promote gridlock in Washington.

Frank Rich summed it up in yesterday’s New York Times:

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

The House stimulus bill is an inevitably imperfect hodgepodge-in-progress. Obama’s next move, a new plan to prevent the collapse of America’s banks, may prove more problematic still, especially given the subpar record of the new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in warding off calamity while at the New York Fed. No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche, fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)

But you might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. As Raymond Moley, of F.D.R.’s brain trust, said of the cross-party effort at the harrowing start of that presidency in March 1933, Hoover and Roosevelt acolytes “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats” as they urgently tried to rescue their country.

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world….

Republicans balk on recovery legislation

The House of Representatives passed an economic stimulus package on Wednesday without a single Republican vote. The legislation is aimed at helping the economy recover from the ongoing collapse over the past several months. These Republicans, of course, are representatives of what had been the majority party in the legislative and executive branches of government for most of the past eight years and, in no small way, hold responsibility for the current state of the economy. Mitchell Bard sums up the situation:

… Obama's solid victory in November, if nothing else, would make it clear that the bankrupt (literally) policies of the last eight years would no longer be seriously considered as a solution. I certainly knew that the Republicans would try to claw their way back to power, but I never imagined they would pull a Groundhog Day, acting as if the absolute meltdown of the last eight years hadn't happened. After all, by electing Obama, the American people pretty directly rejected the failed ways of doing business.

Of the myriad problems George W. Bush and his enablers in Congress left on Obama's desk, the most pressing is perceived to be the economy. So Obama's first major legislative initiative was the stimulus package. Under the market-cures-all philosophy of the last administration (and, in fairness, every administration going back to Ronald Reagan), the financial system collapsed as the greed and irresponsibility of institutions finally reached a tipping point. But what was even more acute during the last eight years was the historic and devastating redistribution of wealth, whereby Bush's tax cuts for the rich and unfailing support for corporate interests led to a situation where, as former Rep. David Bonior put it on Meet the Press on January 11:

"over the last 20 years, the top 10 percent took 90 percent of the income gains in this -- in the country. And the top 1 percent took roughly 60 percent. And the top 1/10th of 1 percent took 35 percent of that. I mean, it's skewed the wrong way."

The system of tax cuts and the like turned the surplus of the Clinton years into a massive deficit, even before the $700 billion financial bailout and current stimulus package came into play. And the Bush years allowed massive gains for the wealthy, all while middle class wages, in real dollars, fell.

So, if nothing else, we should all be in agreement that the Bush years were a debacle, and that the policies of the administration need to be rejected, much like the bake sale/casino night of my analogy.

And yet, on the first major piece of legislation that the popular new president advanced, what did the Republicans in the House do? Suggest a bake sale/casino night.

On the January 11 Meet the Press episode I mentioned above, all of the economists, liberals and conservatives, agreed that some kind of stimulus is necessary to kick-start the economy. Economists will also tell you that if you genuinely want to stimulate consumer spending, tax cuts, especially for the middle class and wealthy, are less effective than government spending, since those tax cuts are more likely to be saved than spent. Programs that aid those in trouble (like food stamps and extended unemployment insurance), as well as programs that create jobs (like infrastructure projects), are far more effective in stimulating consumer spending.

And despite all of this information, not one single Republican member of the House voted for the stimulus bill yesterday. (It still passed, 244-188, with 11 Democrats joining the 177 Republicans in opposing the bill.) Not one. Zero. Zippo. Nada. Nil. None. There wasn't one Republican in the whole House of Representatives who could see his or her way clear to support legislation to help our tanking economy, even if they thought the bill wasn't perfect. And what was the primary objection of the Republicans, based on the GOP's suggested alternative bill (that was voted down by the House)? They wanted more tax cuts.

Seriously? More freakin' tax cuts? What's next? Are they going to be asking for less regulations on Wall Street? Another invasion of Iraq? Were they not watching what happened the last eight years (and, more importantly, what the American people voted for in November)?

***

The bottom line is that this country is in a very dark place right now, and the reason we're there is not a mystery. It is, in large part, the direct result of a set of policies advocated and carried out by the Bush administration. Those policies, including tax cuts for the rich and the facilitation of movement of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the upper class, have failed. While Republicans are free to oppose President Obama's solutions to this mess if they think they have better ideas, merely advocating the old failed policies should not be tolerated.

Obama deserves credit for trying to foster a bipartisan atmosphere in Washington, and I laud his efforts in this regards. But if the Republicans are going to be obstructionist, clinging to failed policies and trying to score political points by keeping the new president from passing the programs he wants (or at least making them look partisan), Obama and the Democrats have to move forward on their own. They have large majorities in both houses and, more importantly, the mandate of a solid presidential election win.

It's time for the House Republicans to offer something useful or shut up and let the rest of us try and undo the mess they helped make. …

Presuming the American people has a right to know about the workings of their government

Transparency and openness are crucial to democratic government. Information generated by public agencies is not the private property of bureaucrats and politicians to hide from the public. Restrictions on information keep the public in the dark as to what their government is doing and can cover up incompetence and wrong doing. With the possible exceptions of certain information pertaining to criminal investigations, national security, and individual privacy the public should have complete and timely access to all government documentation. That certainly was the intention of the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

However, control of information is power and that power has not been given up without a struggle. Since the passage of the original FOIA successive administrations have swayed back and forth on how to interpret the requirements of the law. The Bush administration took an extremely restrictive view of what the American people should be allowed to know about the workings of their government. Fortunately, President Obama believes the American people can be trusted with that knowledge and has instructed federal agencies to err on the side of openness.

This is from Fred Kaplan in Slate:

It has received the least attention of his first-day decisions, but President Barack Obama's memorandum on reviving the Freedom of Information Act stands as the clearest signal yet that his campaign talk about "a new era of open government" wasn't just rhetoric; it's for real.

The key phrase comes right at the top: "The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails."

Later in the memo: "All agencies should adopt a presumption of disclosure. … The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA."

Furthermore, "In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act properly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public." In fact, "All agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public."

This could not be clearer. The new president was calling for a complete reversal of the Bush administration's directives on this matter—and a restoration of the Freedom of Information Act's original purpose.

The Bush era's tone was set in October 2001, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memo to all federal agencies, assuring them that if they were sued for refusing to release documents under the FOIA, the Justice Department would defend them in court as long as their decision had a "sound legal basis." This reversed a guideline, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, noting that the Justice Department would defend agencies' refusals only if releasing the documents would cause "foreseeable harm."

Ashcroft's guidance was reinforced in March 2002, when Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, issued a memo urging agencies to protect information that was "sensitive," even if it was unclassified.

Both memos were written in the aftermath of Sept. 11; the impulse behind them was, up to a point, understandable. However, the bureaucrats who control the documents—cautious by nature and sensitive to signals from on high—took the memos as cues to tighten the lid not just on legitimate national-security secrets (which the FOIA had always exempted from routine disclosure) but on everything.

The consequences were dramatic. From 1995 to 2001, federal agencies declassified 1.15 billion pages of documents under the Freedom of Information Act—an average of 190 million per year. From 2002 to 2006, after Ashcroft issued his memo, agencies declassified 182 million pages in total—an average of just 36 million per year, less than one-fifth the volume.

Even these statistics understate the stranglehold because, in many cases, even after the documents were declassified, the relevant agencies—the Pentagon, the CIA, the SEC, or whatever—refused to release them.

*****

The Obama memo doesn't lay down new law. But it does order his attorney general and his budget director to devise new guidelines and regulations, which will have the force of new law—guidelines based on a presumption of disclosure, the exact opposite of the Bush-Ashcroft guidance.

Again, a presumption is not a requirement; the statute's exemptions covering genuine national-security secrets will no doubt remain in place. But presumptions matter to bureaucrats; they lay down what is expected; they set the boundaries of safe behavior. Under Bush-Ashcroft, the presumption was: When in doubt, classify and lock the archives down. Bureaucrats are always in some doubt, so they slammed the vaults and hid the keys. Obama is saying: When in doubt, if there's no demonstrable harm, open the gates. …

The bottom line -- democratic government should not be conducted behind closed curtains. This is a good beginning for the new administration.

You can read Kaplan’s entire piece here.

The role of labor in the quick response to the downing of the US Airways jet in the Hudson

Marcy Wheeler points out one little bit of information that seems to get overlooked the in press coverage about the landing of the US Airways passenger plane in the Hudson this past week and the rescue of everyone on that plane:

They're calling it a miracle--the successful landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson and subsequent rescue of all 155 passengers. They're detailing the heroism of all involved, starting with the pilot and including cabin crew, ferry crews, and first responders. What they're not telling you is that just about every single one of these heros is a union member.

These unions either provide or promote the very safety training that was a big factor in the saving the lives of all 155 passengers. When union bashing raises its ugly head it is helpful to remember that all our lives are a little richer in ways that are not always obvious due the labor movement.

The problem isn’t the President, it’s the Presidency

Americans are very proud their democratic government. Civics textbooks espouse the virtues of elections and the separation of powers divided between the executive, judicial and legislative branches each with the power to check and balance the power of the other two branches.

Yet contrary to the myth of equal powers, the reality is the executive – in the person of a single officer, the President – is the dominant branch of our national government with the other two serving as junior partners. The election of the President is based upon a Rube Goldberg system most Americans would have difficulty explaining called the Electoral College that gives disproportionate power to small states. The President is held accountable to the American people only once – during the campaign for re-election at the conclusion of the President’s first term. A President may only be impeached and removed for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" – an absurdly high standard for a government that is supposed to be democratic. The President may as well be granted life tenure.

And the President has a wide range of powers unequaled in the other two branches of government. Whether or not these powers are used wisely and whether or not they are used with the support of the American people in our supposedly democratic system is beside the point. Less than a third of the American people approve of the job George Bush is doing as President yet he continues making decisions that affect all Americans and the world and there is nothing the American people can do about it. President Bush’s candidate (Senator John McCain) and President Bush’s party were clearly trounced in the national election in early November yet Bush remains in power two months after this rejection and there is nothing the American people can do about it.

George Bush is certainly a problem but he is not the problem. The problem is the office of the President and how it was structured in the Constitution.

Garret Epps has some ideas on how to reform the U.S. Presidency:

… while George W. Bush may have been a particularly bad driver, the presidency itself is, and always has been, an unreliable vehicle—with a cranky starter, an engine too big for the chassis, erratic steering, and virtually no brakes. It needs an overhaul, a comprehensive redo of Article II.

Constitutional change is a daunting prospect. But consider how often we have already changed the presidency; it is the Constitution’s most-amended feature. And this is the moment to think of reform—the public’s attention is focused on the Bush disaster, and ordinary people might be willing to look at the flaws in the office that allowed Bush to do what he did.

So how should the presidency be changed?

First, voters should elect presidents directly. And once the vote is counted, the president-elect (and the new Congress) should take office within a week. Americans accustomed to the current system will object that this would not allow enough time to assemble a Cabinet—but in England and France, the new chief executive considers ministerial nominations before the election. A shorter interregnum would force the creation of something like the British shadow cabinet, in which a candidate makes public the names of his key advisers. That would give voters important information, and provide the president with a running start.

Next, Article II should include a specific and limited set of presidential powers. The “unitary executive” theorists should no longer be allowed to spin a quasi-dictatorship out of the bare phrase executive power; like the responsibilities of Congress, those of the president should be clearly enumerated.

It should be made clear, for example, that the president’s powers as commander in chief do not crowd out the power of Congress to start—and stop—armed conflict. Likewise, the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” needs to be clarified: it is not the power to decide which laws the president wants to follow, or to rewrite new statutes in “signing statements” after Congress has passed them; it is a duty to uphold the Constitution, valid treaties, and congressional statutes (which together, according to the Constitution, form “the supreme law of the land”).

After a transformative midterm election like that of 1994 or 2006, the nation should require a compromise between the rejected president and the new Congress. A president whose party has lost some minimum number of seats in Congress should be forced to form the equivalent of a national-unity government. This could be done by requiring the president to present a new Cabinet that includes members of both parties, which the new Congress would approve or disapprove as a whole—no drawn-out confirmation hearings on each nominee. If the president were unwilling to assemble such a government or unable to get congressional approval after, say, three tries, he would have to resign.

This would not give Congress control of the executive branch. A resigning president would be replaced by the vice president, who would not be subject to the new-Cabinet requirement. This new president might succeed politically where the previous one had failed (imagine Al Gore becoming president in 1995, and running in 1996—and perhaps in 2000—as an incumbent). And that possibility would discourage the new congressional majority from simply rejecting the compromise Cabinet. Resignation might be worse for them than approval.

As a final reform, we should reconsider the entire Hamiltonian concept of the “unitary executive.” When George Washington became president, he left a large organization (the Mount Vernon plantation) to head a smaller one (the federal government). But today, the executive branch is a behemoth, with control over law enforcement, the military, economic policy, education, the environment, and most other aspects of national life. That behemoth is responsible to one person, and that one person, as we have seen, is only loosely accountable to the electorate.

In other areas, the Framers solved this problem neatly: they divided power in order to protect against its abuse. Congress was split into the House and the Senate to ensure that the legislative process would not be so efficient as to absorb powers properly belonging to the other branches. The problem now is not an overweening Congress but an aggrandized executive branch; still, the remedy is the same. We should divide the executive branch between two elected officials—a president, and an attorney general who would be voted in during midterm elections.

As we are learning from the ongoing scandal of the torture memos, one of the drawbacks of a single executive is that Justice Department lawyers may consider it their job to twist the law to suit the White House. But the president is not their client; the United States is. Justice Department lawyers appointed by an elected attorney general would have no motive to distort law and logic to empower the president, while the White House counsel’s office, which does represent the president, would have every incentive to monitor the Justice Department to ensure that it did not tilt too strongly against the executive branch. The watchmen would watch each other.

This arrangement would hardly be unprecedented: most state governments elect an attorney general. The new Article II could make clear that the president has the responsibility for setting overall legal policy, just as governors do today.

None of these changes would erode the “separation of powers.” That happens only when a change gives one branch’s prerogatives to another branch. These changes refer in each instance back to the people, who are the proper source of all power. The changes would still leave plenty of room for “energy in the executive” but would afford far less opportunity for high-handedness, secrecy, and simple rigidity. They would allow presidential firmness, but not at the expense of democratic self-governance.

It’s not surprising that the Framers did not understand the perils of the office they designed. They were working in the dark, and they got a lot of things right. But we should not let our admiration for the Framers deter us from fixing their mistakes.

Our government is badly out of balance. There is a difference between executive energy and autocratic license; between leadership and authoritarianism; between the democratic firmness of a Lincoln and the authoritarian rigidity of a Bush. The challenge we face today is to find some advantage in Bush’s sorry legacy. Reform of the executive branch would be a good place to start.

This is from the current issue of the Atlantic. I strongly recommend you read Epps' piece in its entirety.

Does it make any difference whether or not Israel’s military actions in Gaza are “disproportionate”?

We have heard a lot about proportionality of Israel’s attacks on Gaza in response to rocket attacks upon Israel from Gaza either directed by Hamas or at least tolerated by Hamas. The implication in these arguments is proportionality is the yardstick to measure morality in actions between states.

The problem with proportionality arguments is they divert attention from more important questions. War between nations is not like two guys in a bar who get in an argument, lose their tempers, and engage in a fight. As Michael Walzer points out below, the purpose of war is to achieve political objectives and not an emotional reaction to a provocation. The first question to answer is whether or not the preferred political objective can reasonably be expected to come about by the pursuit of war and the second question, given the inevitability of civilian causalities during war, is whether or not all reasonable effort is being made to minimize civilian suffering.

Michael Walzer dissects “proportionality” and asks the harder questions about the conflict:

Let's talk about proportionality--or, more important, about its negative form. "Disproportionate" is the favorite critical term in current discussions of the morality of war. But most of the people who use it don't know what it means in international law or in just war theory. Curiously, they don't realize that it has been used far more often to justify than to criticize what we might think of as excessive violence. It is a dangerous idea.

Proportionality doesn't mean "tit for tat," as in the family feud. The Hatfields kill three McCoys, so the McCoys must kill three Hatfields. More than three, and they are breaking the rules of the feud, where proportionality means symmetry. The use of the term is different with regard to war, because war isn't an act of retribution; it isn't a backward-looking activity, and the law of even-Steven doesn't apply.

Like it or not, war is always purposive in character; it has a goal, an end-in-view. The end is often misconceived, but not always: to defeat the Nazis, to stop the dominos from falling, to rescue Kuwait, to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Proportionality implies a measure, and the measure here is the value of the end-in-view. How many civilian deaths are "not disproportionate to" the value of defeating the Nazis? Answer that question, put that way, and you are likely to justify too much--and that is the way proportionality arguments have worked over most of their history.

The case is the same with arguments focused on particular acts of war. Consider the example of an American air raid on a German tank factory in World War Two that kills a number of civilians living nearby. The justification goes like this: The number of civilians killed is "not disproportionate to" the damage those tanks would do in days and months to come if they continued to roll off the assembly line. That is a good argument, and it does indeed justify some number of the unintended civilian deaths. But what number? How do you set an upper limit, given that there could be many tanks and much damage?

Because proportionality arguments are forward-looking, and because we don't have positive, but only speculative, knowledge about the future, we need to be very cautious in using this justification. The commentators and critics using it today, however, are not being cautious at all; they are not making any kind of measured judgment, not even a speculative kind. "Disproportionate" violence for them is simply violence they don't like, or it is violence committed by people they don't like.

So Israel's Gaza war was called "disproportionate" on day one, before anyone knew very much about how many people had been killed or who they were. The standard proportionality argument, looking ahead as these arguments rightly do, would come from the other side. Before the six months of cease-fire (when the fire never ceased), Hamas had only primitive and home-made rockets that could hit nearby small towns in Israel. By the end of the six months, they had far more advanced rockets, no longer home-made, that can hit cities 30 or 40 kilometers away. Another six months of the same kind of cease-fire, which is what many nations at the UN demanded, and Hamas would have rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv. And this is an organization explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel. How many civilian casualties are "not disproportionate to" the value of avoiding the rocketing of Tel Aviv? How many civilian casualties would America's leaders think were "not disproportionate to" the value of avoiding the rocketing of New York?

The answer, again, is too many. We have to make proportionality calculations, but those calculations won't provide the most important moral limits on warfare.

These are the questions that point us toward the important limits. First, before the war begins: Are there other ways of achieving the end-in-view? In the Israeli case, this question has shaped the intense political arguments that have been going on since the withdrawal from Gaza: What is the right way to stop the rocket attacks? How do you guarantee that Hamas won't acquire more and more advanced rocketry? Many policies have been advocated, and many have been tried.

Second, once the fighting begins, who is responsible for putting civilians in the line of fire? It is worth recalling that in the Lebanon war of 2006, Kofi Annan, then the Secretary-General of the UN, though he criticized Israel for a "disproportionate" response to Hezbollah's raid, also criticized Hezbollah--not just for firing rockets at civilians, but also for firing them from heavily populated civilian areas, so that any response would inevitably kill or injure civilians. I don't think that the new Secretary General has made the same criticism of Hamas, but Hamas clearly has a similar policy.

The third question: Is the attacking army acting in concrete ways to minimize the risks they impose on civilians? Are they taking risks themselves for that purpose? Armies choose tactics that are more or less protective of the civilian population, and we judge them by their choices. I haven't heard this question asked about the Gaza war by commentators and critics in the Western media; it is a hard question, since any answer would have to take into account the tactical choices of Hamas.

In fact, all three are hard questions, but they are the ones that have to be asked and answered if we are to make serious moral judgments about Gaza--or any other war. The question "Is it disproportionate?" isn't hard at all for people eager to say yes, but asked honestly, the answer will often be no, and that answer may justify more than we ought to justify. Asking the hard questions and worrying about the right answers--these are the moral obligations of commentators and critics, who are supposed to enlighten us about the moral obligations of soldiers. There hasn't been much enlightenment these last days.

And Matthew Yglesias considers the actions of both sides in the way the world really works :

…what’s most relevant for both sides here are separate elements of just war theory — possession of “right intention” and “reasonable prospects for success.” First from the Hamas side. As Israel’s critics will happily let you know, Palestinians have just cause for fighting against Israel. But Hamas’ actual cause isn’t the just cause of Palestinian independence but an unjust cause of aggression against Israel. And even if Hamas were fighting for a just cause, their method of untargeted rocket fire has no reasonable prospects for success. If the way the world worked was that you should some rockets at Sderot, damage some buildings and hurt a few people, and then suddenly Israeli officials are ready to shake hands on a deal that ends the occupation forever you might be tempted to say that the loss of civilian life would be proportionate to the ends being pursued. But that’s not how the world works and it doesn’t characterize Hamas’ war aims.

A lot of commentators seem to want to believe that the situation on the Israeli side is very different from this. In fact, I think it’s only a little different. In terms of “right intention” this is where the settlements come into play. As long as Israel is occupying illegal settlements in Palestinian territory, restricting Palestinian movement in order to defend them, and indeed expanding the settlements it becomes difficult to view any Israeli activity as purely defensive in nature. And, again, if the way the world worked was that attacking Gaza and causing suffering there led Palestinians to say “you know, these Hamas guys are bloodthirsty maniacs — let’s put some non-violent moderates in charge” you could understand this campaign as having reasonable prospects of success at securing enduring safety from Hamas rocket fire. But that’s not how the world works. So asking what kinds of Israeli actions might or might not be “proportionate” to those war aims is really neither here nor there. Everyone understands that this round of fighting will stop some day soon, but that the halt in fighting won’t create a permanent end to rocket fire.

"Dinner for One" -- the same procedure as every year

“Dinner for One” is an old skit performed since the 1920’s on stage and made famous by its television production in 1963 starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden.

The sketch presents the 90th birthday of elderly upper-class Englishwoman Miss Sophie, who hosts a dinner every year for Mr Pommeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby, and Admiral von Schneider – dear friends she has outlived. Her butler, James, makes his way around the table impersonating each guest. Miss Sophie decides on a variety of drinks to consume with the meal. James then drinks a toast to Miss Sophie on behalf of each guest and become a bit smashed as the evening progresses.

The crucial exchange during every course is:

James: The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?

Miss Sophie: The same procedure as every year, James!

After the dinner, Miss Sophie indicates to a very drunk James that she wishes to retire to bed, to which James responds:

James: By the way, the same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?

Miss Sophie, delightedly: The same procedure as every year, James!

James: Well, I'll do my very best!

Interestingly, while the skit and television production are little known in the U.S. and U.K., it has become something of a cult classic in Germany where it is played every New Year’s Eve and is the inspiration of numerous drinking games. Playing the video has become a tradition – the same procedure as every year.

Freddie Hubbard: “I Remember Clifford” (1984)

This is Freddie Hubbard performing “I Remember Clifford” with Art Blakey and the All Star Jazz Messengers -- Benny Golson, Curtis Fuller, Walter Davis Jr, Buster Williams -- in 1984.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (1938 –2008) was an American jazz trumpeter. He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop and post bop styles from the early 60s and on. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop. Hubbard replaced trumpeter Lee Morgan in Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1961 and played with the group until 1966. From there he played with many small groups of his own. He made several recordings through the early 1990’s.

In 2006, The National Endowment for the Arts honored Hubbard with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award.

Hubbard died this past Monday in Indianapolis from complications following a heart attack in November.

“I Remember Clifford” is a jazz threnody written by Benny Golson in memory of the Clifford Brown, the influential jazz trumpeter who was killed in an automobile accident in 1956 at the age of 25.

Middle East brinkmanship and the rush into the abyss

An Egyptian-brokered cease-fire was agreed to by Hamas and Israel in June of this year. However, hostilities did not end and Israel resumed its blockade of the Gaza Strip leading to widespread shortages.

In mid-December, Israel announced it favored extending the cease-fire if Hamas adhered to its conditions. Hamas, citing the Israeli blockade and border closures, ended the cease-fire and resumed rocket launches into southern Israel. Israel, in turn, retaliated with air strikes and may launch a ground invasion within the next few days.

Gershom Gorenberg has these thoughts on the lost opportunities from the six-month cease fire between Hamas and Israel:

Israelis don’t see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month “calm.” Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the “calm” were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions.

When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force. To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail - especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in.

So brinkmanship led to both sides rushing over the brink into the abyss. Olmert, Livni, Barak and the collected generals apparently think that Hamas will agree to reduce violence as a result of the onslaught. A ten-second exercise in trying to imagine how Hamas leaders - or Gaza residents - see the situation leads to the opposite conclusion.

It is possible that the new offensive will shatter the Hamas government. In that case we’ll have a collapsed state in Gaza, where there is absolutely no one interested in stopping rocket fire. Will Israel occupy the Strip again then? Does our triumvurate think that NATO will want the job? Outside of showing that we have a bigger hammer, what will the operation accomplish?

Outside of the hammer, actually, Hamas did have some delicate tools in its tool chest. It could, for instance, have proposed indirect negotiations aimed at a two-state solution. That would have caught Israel’s leaders totally off guard, and undermined the political rationale for the siege. I guess that no one in the Gaza leadership considered this for 10 seconds.

Then again, before the “calm” ended, Israel could have passed the message that it was willing to recognize a Palestinian unity government and end the siege. Instead, our leaders continued to follow the policy that has failed since the Palestinian elections of 2006: Trying to undo the results via siege tactics.

The people with hammers, too proud to use anything but hammers, have now swung them at blasting caps. They will argue: We need to maintain a credible military option. They forget that a military option is not credible when it cannot produce the results you want (unless the only result you want is a body count). “What did you expect us to do?” they’ll say.

We expected you to think, to be smart enough to imagine how the other side would respond to your actions, to understand that they too are prisoners of pride and fury.

Actually, we didn’t expect that. We only hoped.

Obama’s Middle East challenge

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not come about over night and will not be quickly resolved. Like the conflict over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has resulted in ongoing warfare and violence for decades. And given the dynamics of the politics on all sides of the conflict – the Hamas-Fatah Palestinian split and the weak Israeli leadership about to face elections – the steps towards resolution likely cannot even begin without the strong hand of a third party – i.e., the United States.

The Bush administration has put leadership on this issue on the backburner until that past few months. The little effort put forth recently has obviously been an abject failure.

The Barack Obama will face a Middle East challenge on day one of his new administration. He should avoid the mistakes of the Bush administration not the least of which was to ignore this situation until the end of his term in office. The Obama team should move quickly to try and restart the peace process and move beyond simple ceasefires and towards permanent resolution.

This is Steve Clemons’ take on the situation at the Washington Note:

Part of what is going on today with Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak's unleashing of massive Israeli airpower against Hamas offices in Gaza is a test of Obama's America. Hamas's decision to end its "lull", or temporary ceasefire with Israel, also has a lot to do with testing the U.S. and seeing what the outlines of Obama's policy will be.

Barack Obama cannot afford to allow his presidency and its foreign policy course to be hijacked by either side in this increasingly blurry dispute. Israel's actions today just created thousands of aggrieved and vengeful relatives committed to delivering some blowback against Israel.

Hamas, at the same time, overplayed its hand at a fragile time. Hamas will never play the role of supplicant or subordinate to Israel's interests -- but its resumption of violence before the Israeli elections and during a time of transition in US politics triggered a devastating responce from Israel that signficantly undermined its own interests as a potentially responsible steward of a Palestinian state.

The violence we are watching is just yet another installment in the blur of tit-for-tat violence from both sides of this chronic foreign affairs ulcer.

The US -- and the incoming Obama administration -- must move an agenda forward in Israel-Palestine negotiations that works at levels higher than the perpetrators of this violence. It's time to get this conflict out of the weeds, and time to stop allowing any actors in this drama to hijack the foreign policy machinery of governments trying to push forward a Palestinian state.

America has to get out of the role of "managing" this conflict -- and must solve it. Israel and the Palestinians have shown themselves unable to maturely end their conflict -- and short of a results-oriented strategy that puts the "Middle East Peace Business" out of business, America will be constantly tugged into this conflict and blamed for it.

Herbie Hancock: “Cantaloupe Island”

Herbie Hancock performs his composition, “Cantaloupe Island” with Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter. Hancock first recorded the song in 1964 and it has since become a jazz standard. It is an example of modal jazz set to a funky beat.

Attacks and retaliation across the Israel – Gaza border: The cost of weak leadership

Israel has retaliated to repeated rocket attacks against its southern cities launched from Gaza. Israeli planes bombed targets across the Gaza Strip killing at least 200 and wounding hundreds more. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has come completely unraveled yet the military actions by each side against the other holds little promise of achieving any long term objectives of peace and will only deepen hostilities. The obvious solution – a negotiated resolution of differences – is highly unlikely given the weak positions of the leadership representing both Israel and the Palestinians. The United States, which could use some leverage to encourage the two sides to the table to reach a settlement, is governed by a weak and soon-to-be-retired President who has never valued diplomatic intervention anyway.

As MDC at Foreign Policy Watch sums it up:

As an outsider to the drama, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to me has always been that nobody reasonably expects the actions of either side - this time being air raids on Gaza or rocket attacks on Israeli residences - to achieve their goal or result in a cessation of violence. At the same time, both actions - provocation and response - deepen the hostilities on both sides and with elections around the corner in Israel, the logic of domestic political competition virtually dictates this sort of action from the IDF. To make matters worse, the latest outbreak comes at a delicate time, with essentially lame duck administrations in the US (who never paid much attention to the peace process anyhow) and Israel and a Palestinian leadership fragmented to the point of virtually being two separate entities with distinct territories….

Weak leadership means more armed conflict but armed conflict that is almost guaranteed to resolve nothing. The immediate future for people living on either side of that border does not look promising.

The Bush legacy: Iraq

Foreign policy during the Bush years has been consumed by the Middle East and by Iraq in particular. Iraq became the center of the administration’s “war on terror” (and not Afghanistan, the country that served as the home base for those responsible for the September 11th attacks). Yet with all the attention and resources directed at Iraq there was seemingly little appreciation for that country’s complex history and culture and clearly little thought was put into how to accomplish U.S. objectives.

The elation that followed the toppling of the dictator was short lived after it became clear the Coalition Provisional Authority had no plans to secure Iraq’s borders after abolishing the Iraqi army, had no plans to protect Iraqi citizens from common crime after abolishing the police, had no plans for real rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure, and was clueless about the tensions between the various ethnic and religious groups in a country not created by the native population but by the British in 1921 when the Ottoman Empire was carved up by the victorious allies following WW I.

The result has been intolerable crime and overlapping civil wars between various groups. A huge segment of the population – approximately 15% of Iraqi citizens – has had to flee their homes for safety elsewhere. Presently, the Kurds run the northern part of Iraq practically autonomous from the rest of the country and for the rest of the country a very uneasy peace exists between different Shia factions and between Shia and Sunni Arabs -- a peace that can come unraveled at any time.

Olivia Ward has this assessment in the Toronto Star:

Aid organizations and analysts say that more than five years after the invasion, conditions are grim and in many cases growing worse, as the country suffers widespread poverty, massive displacement, a crippling brain drain and a dangerous breakdown in infrastructure.

"Neighbourhoods are flooded with sewage, households are without water or electricity and there's the threat of spreading disease," says Jennifer Abrahamson of the British-based charity Oxfam. "We are seeing that in the last year the situation has either stayed the same, or gotten worse."

In 2007, as the surge was taking effect, Oxfam and a coalition of Iraqi organizations found that nearly one-third of the 27 million population needed emergency relief, 70 per cent lacked adequate water supplies, 50 per cent were unemployed and 25 per cent of children were malnourished.

In addition, 80 per cent of households had no proper sanitation, and 2 million internally displaced people no means of support. Forty-three per cent of Iraqis were living in absolute poverty.

The surge was aimed at salvaging Washington's Iraq operation, allowing an end to a war with growing American opposition, by quelling insurgencies that were spiralling out of control. But in spite of an impressive drop in Iraqi casualties by more than 1,000 deaths a month, as bombing attacks and fighting diminished, the trickle-down effects have been slow to materialize.

The January 2007 plan temporarily boosted troops by 21,500 to restore order in Baghdad and allow the Iraqi government to launch a process of peace and reconciliation. It was aided by an "Awakening" movement of Sunni Muslims encouraged to join U.S. troops in driving out Al Qaeda cells and by the "freezing" of the main Shiite militia, under leader Moqtada al-Sadr.

But it also brought clashes, violent death, and the virtual partitioning of Baghdad, once a city of mainly mixed neighbourhoods.

"It was the most bitter and destructive time of ethnic cleansing for Iraq," says Michael Schwartz, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context. "To call it a success is a staggering claim."

The 2003 invasion set off a chain reaction of bloodshed and revenge that sent up to 4 million Iraqis fleeing from their homes, as rival Sunni and Shia groups battled for territory. By the end of the surge, four years later, some 2 million people were refugees in neighbouring countries and another 2 million displaced inside Iraq.

Many of the displaced are professionals, including engineers, teachers and doctors. The brain drain has reconfigured Iraq's population, with the poorest and least-skilled remaining, and few able to repair the ruined infrastructure, or run vital services. Even skilled workers find it hard to find paying jobs.

"The government has put money into the medical system and supplies are getting better," says Jean-Guy Vataux of Médecins Sans Frontières. "But there are not enough doctors and nurses and no evidence of a massive return."

Even after the surge, Iraq's security is still so uncertain that hundreds of civilians are killed each month and aid workers can't reach people who are most in need. Women report vicious attacks from Islamists "enforcing" morality codes.

"There's militia violence, criminality and kidnapping," says Juan Cole, who teaches modern Middle Eastern history at University of Michigan. "People who left have got threatening letters even when they were outside the country. They're frightened and they're not going back home any time soon."

As the two main troop contributors, America and Britain, prepare to draw down their forces, there are fears of renewed unrest from destitute Iraqis who have become homeless in their own country.

"There can be no safe withdrawal unless the overall displacement issue is addressed," warns Joel Charny of Refugees International.

Meanwhile, there has been little success in reconciling Iraq's divided society. Kurds, who populate a relatively peaceful autonomous region in the north, are struggling for control of the key oil town of Kirkuk. The Shiite majority are at risk from opposing militias and religious extremists in their own ranks. And Sunnis live uneasily among warring groups, many displaced from their former homes.

You can read the entire piece here.

Summing up the Bush legacy

With only a few weeks left before the swearing in of the new president, it is worth considering the legacy Bush administration will be dropping into the lap of Obama presidency. Unfortunately, George Bush will be leaving the country far weaker than he found it eight years ago.

This analysis is from the L.A. Times:

As President Bush's term comes to a close, the United States has the world's largest economy and its most powerful military. Yet its global influence is in decline.

The United States emerged from the Cold War a solitary superpower whose political and economic leverage often enabled it to impose its will on others. Now, America usually needs to build alliances -- and often finds that other powers aren't willing to go along.

In the 1990s, America exerted leadership in all the remote corners of the globe, from the southern cone of South America to Central Asia. Now, the United States has largely left the field in many regions, leaving others to step forward.

Bush has been blamed widely for the erosion of American prestige. And the decline in U.S. influence is partly the result of the reaction to his invasion of Iraq, his campaign against Islamic militants and his early disdain for treaties and international bodies.

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A decade ago, the U.S. might have been able to bring enough economic pressure on its own to force an end to Iran's disputed nuclear program, said Nikolas K. Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the Naval War College.

But Iran has built economic ties to China and India, among others, so the United States has to assemble a much larger group if it hopes to force Tehran's hand.

"Ten years ago, the U.S. was generally the only game in town, and it had the power to close or crack open the door to Iran," Gvosdev said. "Now other countries have more options. . . . This doesn't mean the United States is weak, but it can't unilaterally impose what it wants."

The U.S. National Intelligence Council issued a report this year, "Global Trends 2025," that notes a shift of economic power from the West to the East that is "without precedent." In 2025, the United States will "remain the single most powerful country, but will be less dominant," it predicts.

Since World War II, the United States has led by its power of persuasion, as well as its economic might. But other countries' unhappiness with the Iraq war and the conduct of the Bush administration's "global war on terror," means that the "American brand is less legitimate and its persuasive powers are compromised," said Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations.

There also has been a dwindling of U.S. influence as the administration has focused most of its energy and resources on the Middle East and Southwest Asia, leaving much less for Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America and other regions. Many are going their own way, developing new ties among neighbors.

Latin American countries, for example, are building an organization called the Union of South American Nations and a NATO-like defense alliance called the South American Defense Council. The United States, long dominant in the hemisphere, is pointedly excluded from both.

An 8-year-old group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with Russia, China, and four Central Asian states, has been slowly developing, in part because some members want a bulwark against U.S. involvement in the region.

Other countries are leading diplomatic initiatives that once would have been the province of the United States.

Qatar has taken the lead in brokering a deal between Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey has been acting as an intermediary between Israel and Syria.

As the United States' political standing has eroded, its economy has remained powerful. Its gross domestic product of $14 trillion a year dwarfs China's $7 trillion, adjusted for purchasing power.

Yet American influence on world economic policy is declining, too. One sign: the failure of the United States and its allies to sell a new agreement to the World Trade Organization in the face of opposition from China, India and other nations.

"The influence of the U.S. private sector is as strong as ever," said Gary C. Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "But the United States is much less able to shape world policy these days."

Many analysts expect that the economic crisis, for which the U.S. is blamed by much of the world, will convince many countries that they shouldn't emulate the loosely regulated American economic model.

You can read the entire piece here.

This economic emergency requires our full attention, our imagination, and action on a grand scale

The economic crisis the country finds itself in is far more severe than anything we have experienced since Great Depression. Consumption and investment are both taking hits which mean there is no growth. We cannot afford the luxury of allowing ourselves to be hobbled by free market ideology. Bold action will be required to salvage the system that supports and promotes our livelihoods. James K Galbraith is promoting aggressive public action building on the historical experience and surviving institutions from the New Deal and the Great Society:

The first priority must be to plug the tax gaps that are rapidly taking down state and local governments and causing enormous pressure for cuts in vital public services, and layoffs, which will only complicate further the housing crisis. Revenue sharing is the way out of this problem. This is just a matter of writing checks, on a large scale — and a bill could be enacted and on the President’s desk on his first day.

Second, capital markets for municipal and for state governments are locked up and if they’re not locked up, then they’re far too expensive. A National Infrastructure Fund could take advantage of the very low rates at which the federal government can now borrow, permitting states and localities to move forward on an entire array of “shovel-ready” investments. That too is just a matter of setting up a rudimentary structure that could be enacted and delivered to the President in a very short time.

The industrial crisis requires immediate action if the auto companies are to survive. For such cases in the future (and there probably will be some) the relevant precedent is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, headed during the New Deal by an intrepid businessman, Jesse Jones, who saved many important companies with a combination of loans and workout plans. A new RFC would enable the federal government to assist industries– perhaps not as large, not as essential, or as threatening as the collapse of the automobile industry would be — but on a somewhat systematic basis for the duration of the crisis.

As for helping the workers who are most severely affected by the industrial aspects of this crisis, Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economics the New School, has proposed a simple and effective step that would further the cause of universal health care: reduce the age of Medicare eligibility to the age of 55. That would take much of the cash burden of healthcare costs off of enterprises, where they don’t belong anyway. And it would provide the opportunity for many workers who would like to retire but won’t do so because they can’t afford to lose their health insurance.

The housing crisis requires mortgage abatement, a resetting of the toxic adjustable rate mortgages already being initiated through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and also a concerted effort out in the neighborhoods to restructure mortgages and to keep people in their homes. Here the historical model is the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which did this in the 1930’s — an enterprise that took about 20,000 people to manage 1 million mortgages. Essentially the same effect could be achieved today by buying back the mortgages through Fannie and Freddie and then turning them over to a restructuring facility – the present version is known as the H4H, or Hope for Homeowners program.

The point is that while you cannot effectively stabilize the price of housing, you can try to save the existing housing stock, stop the spread of blight, the abandonment of homes, and the homelessness that results from an unchecked wave of foreclosures. We will then have preserved those neighborhoods and those communities for a better day.

Further, we have to expect that the fall of the stock market and its impact on the wealth position of the elderly and the near-elderly is going to cause a substantial drop in consumption over the next few years. This is not something that can be repaired individually because people’s stock market losses cannot be made good on a case-by-case basis.

But we can support the income of the elderly population as a group. The way to do that is, for the first time in a generation, to raise the basic Social Security benefit, beyond the cost of living. That would prevent many seniors from falling into poverty and also help to preserve the purchasing power of the elderly as a whole. Today we need Social Security more than ever. We should recognize that going forward it will be a larger, not smaller, part of American retirements. The days when we thought that the stock market might someday substitute for it are at an end, and so should be talk of cutting back on this vital program.

Meanwhile, to protect the Social Security Trust Fund and put an end to talk about financial troubles of that system, Congress could simply place assets acquired under the TARP and related programs into the trust fund, as William Spriggs, professor of economics at Howard University, has proposed.

These measures, in 2009 alone, could inject $450 to $500 billion dollars of new demand into the economy. That would be enough to blunt the economic decline. We therefore need to consider tax relief to working families either directly or indirectly through remission of the payroll tax. It’s a simple, effective means to give a pay raise, and to cut the cost of hiring to employers. It would help many working families to pay their mortgages and to stay in their homes and to pay down their debts. Even if it didn’t immediately boost in total spending, it would put American families on a better foundation going forward.

What is the total size of the package we would require? News reports suggest that President-elect Obama and his emerging team are considering $600 billion, or 4 percent of GDP, for next year. This number is based on a guess, namely that the slump will not be much worse than in 1982, when the unemployment rate went up to about 11 percent. And while that might be right, we cannot be sure.

This crisis is qualitatively different from any we have seen in decades. Moreover, we have been overwhelmed, in recent weeks, by unexpected bad news. The risk of doing too little is far worse than the risk of doing too much. Action should be sufficient to deal with a larger problem, perhaps a much larger problem, than we currently expect.

If we do too little—if we spend $400 billion when $600 billion is required, or $600 billion when $900 billion would have been better—then people will say “Gosh, that didn’t work.” And by then the new administration will have run down its political capital and we may find that it can’t come back for a second bite at the apple. The program we enact in early 2009 needs to show results the first time — and that means bigger rather than smaller.

If we get lucky … and later find that economy is recovering rapidly that suddenly we’ve succeeded, we can always declare victory and pull back from spending more. A trigger mechanism might even be appropriate, to reduce tax relief if joblessness falls below five percent or revenue sharing if state and local budgets return to surplus. In my view, the chances of activating such a trigger are low.

This emergency requires our full attention, our imagination, and action on a grand scale. One hundred and forty-six years ago, the President wrote to Congress:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered, in spite of ourselves.”

That was Lincoln, of course, on December 1, 1862.