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Photos by: joanneleon. September, 2013.
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Edgar Cruz Bohemian Rhapsody at UCO Jazz Lab
News & Opinion
Two minutes. A must watch by Mark Fiore. This was published on YouTube on Tuesday. I wonder who decided not to publish this on the DailyKos front page, the editors or Fiore?
Pete Peterson Exposed: The "Grand Bargain" Hoax
Speaking of Pete Peterson, Austan Goolsbee promotes Peterson's National Debt clock on Twitter. Then says something that looks like an admission that Dems have been going for a Grand Bargain all along, after someone asks him a perfectly sensible question about this situation in which the Dem's official story makes no sense.
Statement by Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke:
Press Release
Release Date: October 9, 2013
For immediate release
Statement by Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke:
President Obama has made an outstanding choice in nominating my colleague and friend Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve Board. Janet is exceptionally well qualified for the position, with stellar academic credentials and a strong record as a leader and a policymaker.
For media inquiries, call 202-452-2955.
Meeting with House Dems today, with Republicans tomorrow. Presumably enough Senate Dems are already on board. Obama continues to deceive the public about not negotiating with a "gun to his head" while in the back rooms, he's negotiating and teams of people have been negotiating these radical "reforms" for a long time.
Bob Costa did the rounds in the media again yesterday and last night. He's talking about a short term extension too. A "framework" has been mentioned but a Super Committee was mocked. A "down payment" on a Grand Bargain was mentioned. I don't see how they don't end up appointing "conferees" and another Catfood Commission, Super Duper Committee. Maybe this time they'll have to pledge to sacrifice their firstborn if they don't strike a grand bargain. The longer it goes, the more likely that this rolls into some massive piece of legislation. You know the way it goes. It's a little too neat though. I wonder if something else will pop up at the last minute.
Dems changed up their messaging over the past couple days. The fact that the Dems had already conceded completely the across the board funding numbers, massive cuts, sequester level cuts, had gotten lost in all the theater and kabuki. They did a terrible job of it for a week and the poll numbers showed it wasn't very effective because both parties were taking the blame in the polls. Now they're doing a better job of it and Pres. Obama stepped in to smooth over the message. A Gallup poll came out showing a big drop in Republican's approval and Costa says they're getting a lot of phone calls from constituents too.
I can't help but think how differently this would have gone if Obama and the Democrats had been out there defending Social Security and Medicare from yet another Republican attack on "entitlements". The public would have been solidly with them and it would have been a BIG win from the start. Unfortunately the leader of the Democratic party is part of that attack on entitlements. The public is still wrapped up in the confusion and the kabuki, so I don't think most people get the underlying goals of all of this yet. It will be interesting to see what happens when they do get it. The virtuous grassroots Left is doing nothing, as far as I can tell. It's a bloody disgrace.
Shutdown Standoff Shows Signs of a Thaw
Near-Term Debt-Limit Increase Gains Support From Conservatives as White House Meeting Is Set
Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, outlined a plan Wednesday to fellow conservatives to extend the nation's borrowing limit for four to six weeks, paired with a framework for broader deficit-reduction talks, according to lawmakers briefed on the proposal. The greater the spending reduction the talks produced, the longer the next extension of the debt ceiling would be under Mr. Ryan's plan.
[...]
At the White House meeting Wednesday, Mr. Obama told House Democrats they "need to be prepared to give and take" and reminded them "we weren't going to win everything," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.), who attended the session. The president, he said, seemed to express "some sympathy for the position Republicans have put themselves in."
[...]
The length of the next debt-limit extension would depend upon the size of cuts. "Small reforms, small extension; medium reform, medium extension," Mr. Ryan told the group of conservatives, according to one participant.
Hey, Van Jones is on board! But yeah, he was all about Occupy and all that. What an incredible phoney and sell out.
I guess it's time to organize. Again. Melt down the switchboards in Washington with calls saying Hell No, no Grand Bargain. People were furious about Chained CPI. Imagine how much they'll love Chained CPI and cuts to Medicare and a more regressive tax code putting more of the burden on those who can least afford it. The elimination of loopholes are a total joke, though the Dems will be out there all across the media talking about the evil corporate loopholes they've eliminated. Then they'll be back next year or the year after. Heck maybe even before they have to file the following year's tax returns. You've seen the lengths to which they will go to hobble the middle class, to further damage the powerless and , to serve the 1%. The leadership are extremists, utterly destroying this country. It's as simple as that. They are the anti-FDR and anti-populist, erasing every gain made and returning us to pre-FDR robber baron days. And it will never be enough. Greed is never satiated. The tools of the 1% will become very very wealthy people when they leave office, I suspect at the expense of millions upon millions of others.
Politically, I don't think it will matter who exactly votes for this Grand Bargain, assuming it gets to Congress and passes. The Democrats might be required to provide the majority of the votes again (like 2011) and the Republicans will pound them into the ground, pound the whole Democratic party into the ground in 2014. I doubt it will end by 2016. We keep hearing from our friends about how the Republican party is in shambles, dealing with the monsters it has created. That may be so, but what will the Democratic party look like after this?
The ice breaks; fiscal talks set
Among the participants will be the House GOP’s budget chief, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), who on Wednesday tried to sell conservatives on a two-step plan to hike the debt limit and reopen the government long enough for Congress to pass entitlement reforms.
[...]
The Ryan proposal also signaled a shift away from a focus on dismantling Obama’s healthcare reform law, which Republicans had made a central demand for keeping the government open in September.
[...]
Lawmakers who heard Ryan’s presentation said the plan would end the shutdown and lift the debt ceiling for about six weeks in exchange for an agreement to make structural changes to Medicare and Social Security. The House and Senate would then have a month and a half to finalize a long-term budget plan and write legislation implementing entitlement reforms.
Updates: The Power Play.
For what it's worth, here's my analysis about what I think is going on. I've mentioned before that I think there's more going on than just a Grand Bargain (as if that's not enough). Things I'm seeing this morning that strengthen that.
When considering all of this, look at things from the perspective of the 1%, the establishment Republicans and Democrats who serve them. Wall Street, Defense & Intelligence Industry, Big Multinational corps, and the billionaires and the politicians owned by them, Let's call them the Establishment or the 1%, though that's not an entirely accurate label. Party isn't relevant in this group. They persist no matter which party is in power. How the Koch brothers fit into this group of people who run the country, I don't really understand.
Before today, I thought it was just the right-wing of the Corporate party making a 2016 power play. I still think that's happening but I think it's more than that, and now I think I understand how both parties are working together on this Shutdown/Debt Ceiling political theater and why.
There are a number of significant events that come to mind but let's look at just two.
In 2011, the Democrats were ready to do the Grand Bargain and Obama really put himself out there by putting Social Security and other things on the table. Boehner left the deal on the table because the more radical parts of his party were going to revolt. Maybe he didn't have the votes either. I don't remember exactly and I'm not sure if we've ever been told the whole story anyway. So the deal failed, after a huge amount of work setting it up. The Left was up in arms too, but the Democrats were still confident that they had their Progressive caucus under control. But the Tea Party and libertarian leaning Republicans were not, and there was a threat to Boehner's speaker position, and it's important that an establishment Repub keeps the gavel.
The other event I'm thinking of is the Amash-Conyers amendment in August. I think that scared the living hell out of the Establishment and the party leaders barely squeaked that out. Immediately afterward, Dems who voted against it let the party leadership know that vote wasn't going to hold and they'd better do something. Others said later that they really regretted their vote against it. It revealed a bipartisan coalition that the Establishment can't easily control. While surveillance is an entirely different issue than the Grand Bargain, a bipartisan coalition like that could block the agenda of the Establishment and in their view, has to be reined in. I don't have a good name for this bipartisan coalition yet, so let's call them the Dissenters for now.
So I think we're looking at a multi-phased Grand Bargain here and a bigger issue of maintaining an iron hold on the Establishment agenda. Obama, Pelosi, Reid and Boehner are Establishment. I'm not sure about McConnell. I think he might be on his way out or not completely cooperative with the rest. I'm not sure how relevant he is anyway.
The people who want this Grand Bargain are the most powerful people in the country, IMHO, and that's why their efforts toward it are so relentless. We know that Wall Street wants it. We know that the conservatives who have been working on unraveling the New Deal for 70 years want it. We know that the neocons want it because social spending threatens war spending, in their view. The Establishment is an intersection of neoliberals and neocons. I've seen theories about how Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan created this hybrid neoliberal/neoconservative. That seems to make sense. Otherwise, I don't know how we'd describe them. The free marketeers, perhaps. Pete Peterson is some kind of front man for them. It's clear that his Institute and the organizations he has created are places where their policies are created, promoted, lobbied.
I'm running out of time for explaining what I've seen this morning to strengthen evidence for my theory, so let me just lay out that I think this is a multi-phased Grand Bargain because the Dissenters might mess it up again. Phase 1 is a long, really scary, widely publicized event (shutdown, threat of default) where some of the Dissidents are flushed out, exposed, and discredited and politicians and the media who work with them help the public anger get directed their way. They begin to create some trust in the Establishment "adults in the room" who emerge and come forward with a solution to the craziness, open up the government again, etc.
So I think that's the main reason for the short term deal where they open up the government, raise the debt ceiling temporarily, and then go back and do the same thing all over again. The president says he doesn't want to negotiate "with a gun to his head" but the Democrats are walking back into the same situation again, or so it seems. But next time, they should be working with a situation where the Dissidents are weakened a lot, paving the way for more control over the votes.
And on the 2016 thing, Chris Christie happened to show up on Capitol Hill yesterday. He didn't want to talk about the shutdown but conveniently he had already made his Establishment statements about it a couple days ago. Paul Ryan emerges as the man with a plan who can work with the Democrats. So maybe there's your 2016 ticket. Who knows.
Some other things on MSNBC this morning:
-The chiron on MSNBC at one point said something about how Republicans are using the shutdown to stake turf for 2016 bid. Who are they worried about the most? I don't think they're too worried about Ted Cruz but he went down in flames. I think they're most worried about Rand Paul. I'm not sure if he got caught up in this shutdown kabuki as much as they hoped he would (especially the filibuster).
- Discussion drifted to 2016 on Morning Joe. Robert Gibbs says nobody is destroying the Republican party except the Republican party and that irrational actors are running the party. They all throw the Tea Party under the bus but some say you can't blame it all on Ted Cruz. Niall Ferguson throws out the false equivalence, saying there is a breakdown in party discipline on both sides. Gibbs says no, Harold Ford pitches for Paul Ryan. They show a Gallup poll displayed saying that dysfunction is a big concern to the American people. They all denounce the Defund Obamacare strategy, which was a red herring all along to everyone but a couple dozen extremists who probably didn't know they were being played as useful idiots. The party leaders and the "moderate"/Corporate/Wall Street Repub faction let them charge forward with their Obamacare Shutdown gig, then started throwing them under the bus within days.
- More and more of the "adults in the room" denounced their attempts to hit Obamacare, leaving a little bit of room for some changes, but showing scorn and sending people out in the media to diss them, which is something you don't see too often intraparty with the Republicans but it's pretty clear that they're trying to take care of their fringe problem before the 2016 primaries. If history is a judge, those will start next year given that the 2012 Republican primaries went on for two solid years. You have to wonder if they were primarily aiming for Rand Paul with this sideshow, hoping he'd go down in flames with Ted Cruz.
- Budget office says default can lead to a recession within 2 months
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Understanding the Game Being Played in Washington
Some portray it as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Warren Buffett says it’s “extreme idiocy.” I’d like to recommend another way of looking at the government shutdown and the looming battle over the debt ceiling in Washington. It’s a game, played by flawed-but-not-crazy human beings under confusing circumstances. In other words, it’s an interaction among “agents” who “base their decisions on limited information about actions of other agents in the recent past, and they do not always optimize.”
That quote is from economist H. Peyton Young’s “The Evolution of Conventions,” one of several works of game theory I plowed my way through this week in an attempt to find a way to think about the government shutdown and looming debt ceiling fight that didn’t make me want to bang my head against a wall. My reading made the dynamics at work in Congress and at the White House a bit clearer — and thus slightly less maddening, if not less ominous.
[...]
Let’s consider what House Republicans have learned from their two years of debt-limit brinkmanship. They have learned, first of all, that it works. They got the White House to agree to a bunch of automatic spending cuts (the sequester) in 2011, and then in early 2013 they were able, from what seemed to be an exceptionally weak bargaining position after President Obama’s reelection, to keep most of the Bush-era tax cuts from expiring and to force yet another debt-ceiling battle only a few months later. More broadly, Republican office-holders and activists have learned over the past couple of decades that making what at first sound like unreasonable demands (no new taxes, no gun control) and repeating them for years on end can actually shift the terms of the debate to the point where the demands seem normal. It has been a successful strategy.
Ron Wyden was part of a big panel at CATO yesterday and this op-ed came out the same day, which I think was his speech at the conference. I saw some later panels but not his speech.
Beware the business-as-usual brigade's efforts to sabotage new NSA oversight
Now is the time for Americans to demand safeguards to liberty, for the enemies of surveillance reform are out to thwart us
A good way to measure the credibility of scholars and thinkers in Washington is by watching to see whether they stay true to their views regardless of the impact that their views have on partisan politics. That's why Cato scholars like Jim Harper and Julian Sanchez are go-to leaders on the issues of security and liberty. Big thanks for inviting me today.
This conference could not be more timely. The Senate intelligence committee will soon be marking up a new surveillance bill, and the House and Senate judiciary committees are working on legislation, as well. Two weeks ago, a bipartisan group of senators – myself included – kicked off this debate by introducing the first comprehensive surveillance reform bill to follow the June disclosures. Our legislation would end the bulk collection of Americans' records, close the backdoor searches loophole that allows Americans' communications to be reviewed without a warrant, make the Fisa court operate more like a court worthy of the United States, and expand the ability of our citizens to have their grievances heard in federal courts.
I know these issues will be discussed here today, so I'll start with my bottom line: the goal of our bipartisan bill is to set the bar for measuring meaningful intelligence reform. We wanted to put this marker down early because we know in the months ahead we will be up against a "business-as-usual brigade" – made up of influential members of the government's intelligence leadership, their allies in thinktanks and academia, retired government officials, and sympathetic legislators. Their game plan? Try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince the Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting. Their end game is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin-deep.
This is by
Yochai Benkler "an Israeli-American professor of Law and an author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University." He is a proponent of Wikileaks and he testified for the defense in the Chelsea Manning trial. Bruce Schneier is also at the Berkman Center and was on one of the CATO panels too and he cited some of the same specifics about the cases that NSA has been using (without detail) to convince the public of how they're keepoing the nation safe, and that Benkler cites in this article, with some detail about them. Well worth reading.
Fact: the NSA gets negligible intel from Americans' metadata. So end collection
Defenders of the NSA's bulk data collection program argue its necessity. But the evidence it makes us safer is vanishingly small
Congress may be on the verge of prohibiting the NSA from continuing its bulk telephony metadata collection program. Two weeks ago, the Senate national security dissenters: Wyden, Udall, Paul, and Blumenthal proposed prohibition. Last week, the move received a major boost from a bipartisan proposal by core establishment figures: Senator Patrick Leahy, and Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner and John Conyers.
[...]
In a 2 October hearing of the Senate judiciary committee, Senator Leahy challenged the NSA chief, General Keith Alexander:
Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and that of the 54 only 13 had some nexus to the US? Would you agree with that, yes or no?
Alexander responded:
Yes.
Leahy then demanded that Alexander confirm what his deputy, Christopher Inglis, had said in the prior week's testimony: that there is only one example where collection of bulk data is what stopped a terrorist activity. Alexander responded that Inglis might have said two, not one.
Hank Greenberg’s narcissistic and deluded defense of Jamie Dimon
This Hank Greenberg column in the Journal on Tuesday is more shameless than your average WSJ op-ed. And that’s saying something.
Greenberg, whose too-big-to-fail company played a critical role—perhaps the critical role—in goosing the housing bubble by acting as a sort of dump for Wall Street’s mortgage-securities risk, comes to the defense of JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who’s been getting buried lately under a slew of fines, investigations, and settlements for fraud by his bank. Greenberg thinks Dimon is being persecuted like Eliot Spitzer supposedly persecuted him in the mid-aughts.
And Greenberg has a case of oligarch empathy for Dimon—the kind that allows him to once again, despite all the evidence, claim to have been wrongly martyred
I don't know how much stock I'd put in this analysis since I'm not familiar with the site (I've become cynical about any label or title with the word "pragmatic" in it) but Scenarios 2 and 3 were not on my radar. I have, however, been skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how our economy would crash and everyone's net worth crash too in the event that the red clowns decide to take things too far. The executive and the Fed just have too much power to believe they would have no options. Anyway, the author finds scenarios 2 and 3 unlikely and for the record thinks both sides will come to some kind of bargain, a small bargain, right at the last minute before the debt ceiling deadline.
The Most Likely Debt Ceiling Outcome
Scenario 2. (Unlikely) If Congress can’t come to an agreement before October 17th then Ben Bernanke will swoop in to save the day. Remember, the Federal Reserve was created specifically to avoid financial crises and to maintain a smooth operating payments system. And under the exigent circumstances clause the Fed Chief can basically do whatever is in his monetary control so long as he thinks it will avoid catastrophe. Given that a default would obviously cause a catastrophe the Fed, as the gatekeeper to the Treasury General Account, will work with the US Treasury to avoid a default. That means they’ll either perform some form of QE directly with the Treasury or they’ll just directly buy the bonds from the US Treasury with the agreement that they’ll sell them back for reissuance on the private market once the circus ends in Washington.*
The exigent circumstances clause is the cleanest and most logical way for the US government to avoid defaulting. And it avoids all the potentially messy alternatives like minting platinum coins or selling ultra premium bonds. And since President Obama would certainly place Ben Bernanke (and other voting members) at the top of a pardon list in exchange for this I see no downside for the Fed Chief. In fact, he’ll get to say he saved the world for the second time in 5 years. How many people can lay claim to that? No reasonable person could say the Fed broke the law under this environment when it was simply exercising its Congressionally granted exigent circumstances clause to save the country. And more importantly though, the US Treasury doesn’t have to be involved in breaking the law (which leaves the Executive Branch out of the equation).
In the case of exercising the exigent circumstances clause the US Congress becomes a moot point. Once the Fed is funding the US Treasury, Congress is just bickering for no reason because the central bank has effectively obtained the power of the purse. They’ve exposed the debt ceiling for the non-constraint that it is.
So our surveillance programs are used to prevent terrorism? Dilma is pissed again. Greenwald noted that her tweets were particularly strident. "It is urgent to the u.s. and its allies q terminate their espionage actions once and for all." "This is unacceptable among countries that claim to be partners. We reject the cyberwar."
Canadian spies targeted Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry: report
A Brazilian television report that aired Sunday night said Canadian spies targeted Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry.
The report on Globo television was based on documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and was the latest showing that Latin America’s biggest country has been a target for U.S., British and now Canadian spy agencies.
[...]
Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao told Globo that “Canada has interests in Brazil, above all in the mining sector. I can’t say if the spying served corporate interests or other groups.”
[...]
Globo previously reported that the communications of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and also state-run oil company Petrobras were targeted by NSA spying.
Not sure what happened here. News broke, then news was removed, but AP left the story like this.
Court records: McAuliffe invested with RI estate planner indicted in death benefits scheme
STORY REMOVED: BC-AP-VA — McAuliffe-Death Benefits
RICHMOND, Va. — The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about documents in a federal fraud case alleging that Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe lied to a federal official investigating a death benefits scheme. The indictment did not identify McAuliffe as the “T.M.” who allegedly lied to investigators.
Micah Zenko (Foreign Policy), someone I have been following for about six months and am very impressed with. He's a fellow at the dreaded Council on Foreign Relations, lol, so maybe he's a decoy or maybe what they say about CFR is silly. I really don't know. I'm almost completely detached from the media organization these days and focused solely on the journalist, with a few exceptions. There are some interesting things in this article (hard to excerpt) and tons of links and in the end it really reinforces what a perfect war terrorism is for fueling a massive war profiteering machine.
The Known Unknowns of Counterterrorism Ops
When it comes to assessing the success of the war on terror, there's a lot we just don't know.
Last Friday, Navy SEALs reportedly attacked a compound in the coastal city of Barawe, Somalia, with the goal of capturing or killing a senior leader of al-Shabab. According to an Obama administration official: "It did not achieve the objective." Hours later, Army Delta Force commandos were reportedly involved in a mission in Tripoli, Libya, which led to the capture of Abu Anas al-Libi, who was indicted in a U.S. district court for his alleged involvement in the U.S. African embassy bombings in 1998. These twin counterterrorism operations conducted 3,000 miles apart were lauded as "a major blow against the remnants of al Qaeda's core," by Rep. Adam Schiff; as a confirmation of "the unparalleled precision, global reach, and capabilities of the United States military," by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel; and as "a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects," by the New York Times.
Several news reports and analysts also claimed that the operations demonstrated that the Obama administration suddenly prefers capturing suspected terrorists to killing them. Recent evidence would suggest otherwise. In 2013, by one estimate, there have been 45 U.S. drone strikes (in Pakistan and Yemen) that killed approximately 209 people; two raids that captured one person are clearly not the equal. There are assuredly other covert or clandestine capture/kill operations that we do not know about, but it is far too soon to tell if this portends a wholly new policy shift.
[...]
Since quiet or unreported counterterrorism programs are impossible to evaluate in real-time, they subsequently have little salience in policy debates. On the other hand, drone strikes that occur in plain sight, or widely reported special operation raids, are unmistakable and treated as privileged sources of data for evaluating counterterrorism policies. But while there are three databases that provide estimates of U.S. targeted killing operations and casufalties, there is none for covert "influence" operations or for the application of financial tools.
[...]
There are scores of major, multi-year counterterrorism operations going on around the world, just as there committed terrorists plotting to conduct international attacks. However, few terrorism or counterterrorism activities ever come to light, and even when those activities do, they usually lack the specificity or comprehensiveness to assess their overall impact. Given this reality of such uncertainty, when thinking about the phenomenon of terrorism, we should be conscious about how little we really know, and refrain from over-interpreting those few public events that appear in the news.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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